The Ultimate Credit Crunch Card (Sapphire Radeon HD 3450)

Member Name: TheSlyOne

Product:	Sapphire Radeon HD 3450
Date:	02/08/09 (36 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, handles every day activites well, reliable

Disadvantages: poor in power, gets hot, plays little games at a good standard

Now in times of global recession it is natural that people are short of money. As a result there are very few people wanting to spend big cash for a graphics card and will prefer to settle for the cheaper option. This card is that option.

This graphics card is a great low-mid range piece of kit for anyone to use and at a very affordable price too. For the casual user this card would serve as a good entertainment and media starter card as it is capable of solid video playback and the odd game or too. Don't expect this card to work wonders in the games department though, but you can expect some of the lower demanding games to run fine on this card such as Wow and The Sims.

For the average gamer, I would advise that you shoot for something with a bit more umph, and albeit more expensive. But this would be perfectly fine for anyone wanting to watch a few dvd's and play some low end games.

When I had it I could play WoW at a steady 25-35 fps with settings around low-medium. I found out that games made later than say 2005 are not going to play very well on this card. For example, I tried playing The Sims 3 that just recently came out and found it to be very choppy even at low settings, which is partly why I upgraded my graphics card.

This card does, however, feature DVI and HDCP which mean that it can support a HDTV and this is great for those who like me love movies in high definition quality. I used this feature on a few occasions and everything went smoothly with no problems.

It features 256mb of DDR2 ram which isn't spectacular in todays gaming world when you consider the ATI HD4870's and Nvidia 280gtx's featuring a gig's worth of GDDR4 ram with extreme graphics capabilities.

To summarise, you aren't going to get a whole lot of power with this card, but for the average user this card will get the job done for a small price, 'nuff said.

Summary: If you are low on money and need a simple card to cope with those everday tasks then this is for you

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