Diamond Radeon HD 3450

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.