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Overall, the Diamond HD 3450 is good card. Its most attractive selling feature is its home theater PC's possibilities: for just $50-$55 dollars, you can throw this card into even an older computer, and have no trouble watching HD videos on it. All you need is that PCIe slot.

How is the card for gaming? Better than I expected -- but my expectations were fairly low. In the videos you can see that games are playable with a HD 3450, which is about all you can ask from a card this price. Part of the reason why we focused on game performance so much for this look at the Diamond HD 3450 was to see whether or not the advertising on both the box, and Diamond's website, was being reasonable and truthful when it claimed that the HD 3450 can deliver gaming experiences. As my investigation has hopefully shown, the HD 3450 can deliver, as promised. Once again I do not expect anyone to purchase this card expecting to be able to play many games, but if they did have the HD3450 in mind, it will probably be reassuring for them to know that -- at least on lower graphic settings -- gaming on a HD3450 is possible.

For someone that was putting together a HTPC or looking for inexpensive upgrade to a very old video card in their system, the Diamond HD 3450 will do the job fine. If playing videos is your only concern, and you have no desire to play anything beyond the occasional game of Minesweeper, than this card could be a fine choice -- especially as it has the HDMI output that many other video cards lack. While you could buy an HDMI to DVI adapter, that's about $10 often, so that's a significant additional price to pay if you are looking at video cards under the $80 mark.

However, if gaming is something that you would want to spend more than a handful of hours on, judging from the benchmarking charts the previous page, it seems like a straight-forward decision: you really would be better off spending about $20 more and going with something like a 8600 GT -- or a HD 2600 Pro, which as of this writing, can be found for even the same price as a HD 3450 at some online retailers. The one exception to this case would be if you recently purchased a 780G chipset motherboard. Though we have not tested this ourselves, from many reports the HD 3450 Crosslinked with the IGP of a 780G motherboard delivers reasonable performance, and could be a good option if you already have the motherboard.

Opposite ends of the current generation's spectrum: The Diamond HD 3450 and a 9800 GX2.