Fresh through the doors of the Labs is the cheapest 3000 series offering from ATi. The Radeon HD 3450 is a minor revision of the HD 2400 series, adding support for DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, among other things.

With a relatively modest 40 stream processors, however, and a core clock of just 600MHz, it certainly won’t run games such as Crysis smoothly, and you’ll have to make do with painfully low resolutions and settings. A quick look at the graphs on page 60 will reveal that the HD 3450 is rooted firmly to the bottom of the gaming ladder. Even Crysis’ forgiving Low settings proved too much for it.

Although you can line up a pair in a CrossFire configuration, of more interest may be ATi’s Hybrid CrossFire technology. If you buy an AMD motherboard with the new Radeon HD 3000 series integrated graphics, the HD 3450 can essentially link to it to combine the graphical power of the two. It isn’t valid at this stage, but once compatible motherboards arrive you’ll see system builders pushing these cards.

More interesting still is ATi PowerPlay, which shuts down parts of the card when not in use to keep power consumption to a minimum. The HD 3450 also supports the new DisplayPort interface, as well as HDMI, so it could be an excellent media card if graphics card manufacturers implement either – at this point only the latter looks likely.

This brings us to the 3450’s real function, which is video. It supports ATi’s Unified Video Decoder technology, allowing it to run full 1080p high-definition video without overstressing the CPU. Technically, it can decode up to 1440p, but 1080p is key and, crucially, the HD 3450 can manage it.

If you just want a cheap media-centre card for its video outputs and decoding capability, the GeForce 8400 GS is cheaper than this. But low-end ATi cards tend to be HDCP compliant more often than Nvidia’s and this plus the PowerPlay function may well be enough to persuade you it’s worth spending that little bit extra, particularly if you can find one with HDMI.