ASUS EAH3450 Radeon HD Video Card (256MB)

[heatvent]

Anyone using this card? I am trying to setup SageTV and get an occassional stutter when watching HD. I am using Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 9 as the decoder and have enabled 3D acceleration. I have tried the SageTV decoder with similar result. Also, I tried using ATI CCC to auto overclock the card which helps but not stutter free yet. My specs are:

2.8GHz Pent D
4GB Ram
P5Q-EM Asus MB
Vista Premium
HVR-2250 TV Card
CPU Usage 20-30% w/ HDTV going
Memory Usage about 1GB

Best practices/performance tweaks/etc. would be greatly appreciated.

BTW, I am starting to appreciate why everyone wants to use extenders. PC tweaking sucks.

Thanks

[Wirenut]

I have an Asus P5Q-Pro Mobo and tried that same card. EAH3450 Silent, fanless card.

I tweaked it six ways from Sunday... for about a week, and failed to get rid of the studdering. I've run a lot of ATI based cards and that card had me stumped.

One thing to try, make sure your display is the primary display. Also set the de-interlacing to vector adaptive and untick the 3:2 pulldown detection. I had the least studdering with the Nvidia Purevideo decoder. I had problems with the AVIVO decoders... and don't have any PowerDVD decoders installed on the system. Try different versions of Ati's Catalyst Control Center. I believe that card worked best with the drivers that came with it. Every newer one had troubles. The newest I tried was v9.3....

So I bought the card at NewEgg for $29.95 brand new. So I guess ya get what you pay for, as I bit the bullet and bought the Sapphire HD4870 card and now have absolutely great video. It just works. Albeit $199.00.

Best of luck.

YMMV,

Wirenut

[heatvent]

I think I got the issue corrected. I tried the Intervideo codecs from Hauppauge and that worked much better. I then tried out the windvd 9 codecs and those produced a really nice picture with no stutter (the codecs support ATI Avivo). So I am sticking with these for now. The CPU usage is a little higher than the PowerDVD codecs (30-45% for HD) but it's worth it because the picture is so much better and no stutter. I may consider upgrading the CPU at some point.

Not bad, I got the card for $14.95 after rebate at Newgg so worth the $ for a fanless card with HDMI out. I would probably had preferred Nvidia better and I hear good things about the Purevideo codecs but the Nvidia cards are limited for fanless and similar specs and cost a quite a bit more.

I may try overclocking the card again and/or the CPU (have no idea how to do this) to get the CPU usage down.

[Wirenut]

That's cool. Glad you got a combination to work. I think I'm gonna try dropping that card in another PC and see what happens.

Peace,

Wirenut

[dale_ander]

I've got the ASUS EAH3450 Silent card with 512MB of RAM. I just got it a month ago and it's working great for me. No issues with video whatsoever.

Note I'm not using the HDMI output, but rather the DVI output, as my TV as a DVI input specifically for use for Computers.

I did have to adjust the card's output via the Catalyst center, or whatever it's called. I can't recall the exact resolution I ended up using. It was something like 1784 x 1008. When I had it set to 1920 x 1080 I couldn't see the sides of the display.

Bottom line, I think the card is great. At least with 512MB of RAM and the way I'm using it it is.

[dale_ander]

FYI, the card is able to display Blu-ray movies on my TV via the DVI connection too, which I was not sure it would be able to do.

[heatvent]

FYI to anyone considering this card. It will ultimately work but it is more or less meeting the minimum requirements of what you need. I have a Pent D 2.8 ghz and it was working around 30-40% usage displaying HD. I swapped the card out for an HD 4350 with 512MB and my usage dropped to 10-20%, video loads quicker, etc. I got the new card on Newegg for 24.99 after rebate.

I would recommend staying away from the 3400 series and go with at least a 4300 series. With a lot of the rebate deals, price is not much different and worth the 5 extra bucks. Downside is you will probably get something with a fan on it. I my case the Gigabyte card fan is extremely quiet. Here is a link to the one I got:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125251