Graphics card selection HD3450 v HD3650 (1 Viewer)

[gloomyandy]

Folks,
I've recently completely upgraded my MP system and I thought I would share a rather surprising outcome...

First some background. I was moving from a basically working system that handled SD video using DVB-T tuners with a 32" 1366x768 display pretty well. However Freesat and BBC-HD tempted me to upgrade to a 1080p panel plus a new tuner abd my old system could not handle the job.

My old system had on board video that was not easy to upgrade and limited PCI slots (so I wanted to avoid that problem). I found that even with coreavc as a codec the cpu was maxed out, so I really wanted to go hardware decode if I could. I also wanted to use HDMI for both video and audio is possible.

So after reading around a lot (and rejecting the popular 780 motherboard solution because I wanted to go Intel processor for this build), I decided that an ATI HD3450 card fitted the bill. I wanted to keep noise down and so chose a Saphire Radion HD3450 with passive cooling. In retrospect this was a mistake....
1. When I opened the box it did not have HDMI output (my fault for not reading the fine print).
2. The magic dongle needed to enable HDMI seems almost impossible to get hold of in the UK. I managed to buy the wrong type easily enough though (I got the older one thet works with the 2000 series!).
3. This thing runs very hot 70 C when doing nothing and 85 C when decoding SD content.
4. The hardware decoding worked pretty well. I was seeing less that 10% cpu usage when playing both SD and HD content. So very happy with that. HD looked awesome!
5. However I was not so happy with the quality of SD decoding. Further investigation revealed that even with PDVD8 codecs this card did not perform high end (motion adaptive and motion vector), de-interlace when running at 1080p output.

So the card was good (and had a very good price). But did not really work as well as I had hoped. After much searching and thinking and reading I decided to give ATI another chance, but this time with a 256MB MSI Radeon HD 3650 OC. With this board...
1. It has an hdmi output built into the board. Audio out just worked as soon as I plugged it in.
2. The card has a fan on it which I was not so keen on, this fan out of the box is noisy. However the card uses variable gpu and memory clock speeds. When doing nothing the temperature was 28 C. When decoding video it was only 35 C. As an experiment I unplugged the fan connector. Without the fan the temperature was only 58 C when decoding video!
3. The extra gpu power means that it can happily run full vector-motion de-interlacing and also has sharpening and noise filtering options enabled (both were disabled on 3450).

So all in all paying that little bit more for a card gave me much more of what I wanted. But the thing that surprised me the most was just how much better at power/heat management this card is. I now run it with the fan turned way down (using a Zalman fan controller that I had left over from another build), you can't hear it at all and the board runs happily at 40 C when decoding video. The hdmi audio out works fine, with no messing around with drivers or dongles... I'm very happy with this card....

Hope this is of interest...

Andy

 

[doornjoostje]

Hello Andy,

Nice to hear that you find a good GPU for your system.
I read you have a WXGA HD ready screen (1366x768).
What resolution you use right now?

 

[gloomyandy]

Hi,
When I upgrade things I also updated my TV I now have a 1080p display so 1920x1080. One of the problems I hit was that the HD3450 did not support the more advanced de-interlacing options when driving this new display...

Andy

 

[doornjoostje]

Nice upgrade.
That's a good way of solving this problem.
Now let's see what my girlfriend thinks. LOL

I just read on the site http://www.omegadrivers.net/ that the omega drivers are back, so hopefully a new omega driver with the 8.7 catalyst driver.
Then my problem is solved, and i can select 1366x768 and have 1:1 pixel mapping. My former HTPC contained a nvidia, that didn't have any problems at all, to select a custom resolution.

 

[blogra]

Andy,
Thanks for the good explanation of your graphics experiences. I am the market for a graphics card also. This may seem a bit pedantic, but have you noticed whether fast scrolling credits (particularly those going horizontally) tend to be blurry. On an analog signal, the scrolling is smooth, but digital is jumpy.

regards

 

[gloomyandy]

Hi,
Glad the information was of interest. I understand totally about the scrolling thing. With my old 1366x768 display I had a lot of trouble with this. The EDID data from the TV did not advertise a 50Hz (or some other multiple of 25Hz, I'm in the UK which uses 25Hz frame rates) refresh rate. So out of the box I had little jumps as things scrolled. I managed to force a 50Hz refresh using powerstrip (but lost 1:1 pixel mapping as a result). My new TV advertises 50Hz and with that setup scrolling is smooth. However on SD signals there is a slight blurring of the text. I'm not sure if this is just because it is SD on a big monitor, or some artefact of the de-interlacing process. One of the things I have noticed is that with the more advanced de-interlacing options when used on SD you do occasionally see some slightly odd effects (but again this may be down to watching a relatively low res highly compressed DVB-T signal on a biggish screen). Certainly the AVS forums are full of people mentioning such effects from the processing provided by a number of TVs (Sony, Samsung), etc. when using more sophisticated processing options....

All the best

Andy

 

[robyf]

Andy,
Thanks for the good explanation of your graphics experiences. I am the market for a graphics card also. This may seem a bit pedantic, but have you noticed whether fast scrolling credits (particularly those going horizontally) tend to be blurry. On an analog signal, the scrolling is smooth, but digital is jumpy.

regards

I have also this problem with a 3450 and wonder if it could be solved using a 3650.

 

[robyf]

Andy,
Thanks for the good explanation of your graphics experiences. I am the market for a graphics card also. This may seem a bit pedantic, but have you noticed whether fast scrolling credits (particularly those going horizontally) tend to be blurry. On an analog signal, the scrolling is smooth, but digital is jumpy.

regards

I have also this problem with a 3450 and wonder if it could be solved using a 3650.

I solved this problem by disabling cool&quiet in the bios configuration as suggested in various post. Now the video is almost smooth as the one of my set top box.

 

[revs]

I recently purchased the same Saphire HD 3450, mainly for HD decoding.

At first I was quite dissapointed as I had some driver issues, and SD content looked terrible. Luckily after a bit of fiddling and registry tweaks the picture now looks really good - i've even turned off ffdshow and all that extra complication!

I'm not sure if i'd buy it again, possibly. I guess now its woking, its working really well. I havent noticed any heat issue, and have been happy with the deinterlacing so far.

As its all working, I think i'll stop looking so hard at the quality. I sometimes with I didnt understand refresh rates, judder, deinterlacing etc.. it just spoils films and tv, as i spend more time analysing the image than I do enjoing whats on!!!

EDIT: I have spdif out, so the lack of HDMI is not a problem. I use a DVI to HDMI cable.

At the end of the day it was £30 and is a huge improvement on my old NVidia 6600GT. Not having to bother with ffdshow and other tweaks is great.

 

[disaster123]

Could you please tell me, which options you changed?