fanless low-profile HDMI 3450 for HD, sounds great but...

[Hifriday]

Recently added a USB digital TV tuner to my HTPC, HD 1080i H264 broadcast over DMB-T/H. On my aging rig (3500+ 6150 chipset running Vista connected to a 1080p screen), HD playback was way too choppy, switching over to a dual-core Opty 170 made it ok, but CPU loaded around 90% and occassional frame drops. Furthermore power consumption was getting close to 100W during HD playback, a little on the toasty side. Since the TotalMedia tv decoder supports hardware acceleration, I figured adding a 3450 card would help offload the H264 decoding. The ASUS EAH3450 card seemed to fit nicely, low-profile, fanless, HDMI, and priced under $40.

Power consumption in Vista idle went from 56W to 61-65W (a very acceptable 5-9W increase). But that's about all that went well...

1) DVI NOT WORKING
The D-sub worked fine, but I couldn't get the DVI to work. It detected the monitor fine, but no image/signal despite fiddling with various versions/settings of the catalyst driver. Even no DVI signal during post. I got a replacement card, but results were exactly the same. A search on AMD website revealed the following
737-26586: Radeonâ„¢ Series - No Display With Some TFT Monitors Through DVI Connection in Windows and it seems this problem dates back to the Radeon9500 days, and shockingly
Cause = Not known. Solution = Currently there is no solution

My monitor is a Dell 2001FP granted it is kind of old, but I never had problems connecting to a myriad of other graphics cards or motherboards in the past (including a Radeon9550). Plugging in a slightly newer Dell 2401 did work though.

2) FLICKERING LINES
There were flickering lines across the video and this got worse as the video window size was increased. Only by disabling dual monitors, was I able to get this problem to disappear.

3) NO HARDWARE ACCELERATION UNDER VISTA
Hardware acceleration was not working, CPU loading remained at 90% during 1080i H264 playback! This however seems to be a problem with the TotalMedia decoder not proper supporting Vista so can't blame the 3450. I tried XP, and with hardware acceleration enabled, the CPU load dropped down to a very nice 10%. Power consumption during playback also went down from 100W to 70W. However this brought about another problem...

4) BLOCK/TEARING WIHT HARDWARE ACCELERATION IN XP
With hardware acceleration, there was noticable tearing in the video. This appeared as small blocks of the image being displayed in the wrong part of the screen for a very brief time. However it occurred often enough that the quality of the video wasn't acceptable. When I tested the same tuner/software on a 8800GT with hardware acceleration, the image was fine and had no issues, not to mention a loading of only 1% (much faster CPU though).

I don't know if future driver issues can fix these problems, or if other brands 3450s perform better, or maybe less issues with other H264 content. Certainly seems 3450 was a bad choice in my case, but welcome any help from others who managed to get 3450/3650 working well with HD playback.

[DanceMan]

Not that it would make much difference, but do you have the 256 or 512Mb version? I have the 256, not installed yet.

[danielG]

The onboard GPU in my 780G motherboard, a Radeon 3200 HD, does not like my 720p HDTV. When connecting them through VGA (d-sub, I guess) I get flickering diagonal lines on my screen at all resolutions except the native: 1360x768. Much like a TV with an overboosted antenna signal. Haven't tried the DVI/HDMI ports, though.

I haven't tried to solved this problem since I have a dedicated Asus EAH 3650 (with a clicky fan ) and it never me gave such problems. It runs very well through VGA. I haven't tried HDMI on this card yet.

I don't know how well my 3650 handles HD playback, since I can't figure out how to enable GPU decoding on x264 files.

I'd say your best solution would be to return that 3450 and get a passive 3650.