HIS Radeon HD 3450 Silence 256MiB
It's a half-height card - sort of. The blue PCB that houses the GPU and memory chips is smaller than normal, but the passive cooling, larger than the Gigabyte's means that it's just a case of HIS saving a few cents in manufacturing rather than delivering a smaller form-factor.
The cooling doesn't concurrently cool the memory chips, though.
Clocked in at 594MHz for the engine/shaders and 792MHz for the DDR2 memory, the HIS card's RAM is slower than the expected 1GHz. As such, the speed and bandwidth are exactly half that of a stock-clocked Radeon HD 2400 XT GDDR3.
We're nonplussed by HIS' slower clocking, because it limits what is already (and understandably, given the price-point) a stunted architecture, and such degradation will be manifestly shown in our benchmarks.
Contrary to the PowerPlay feature on the HD 3400-series, the GPU doesn't clock down when in 2D mode. Not really a problem when using a zero-noise cooler, but it's wasted MHz, frankly.
A supporting motherboard will offer multi-GPU CrossFireX, where the card can be paired with another of the same architecture for near-double framerates. Hybrid CrossFire is a feature, too, and we'll talk about that as we look at the Sapphire card.
Exactly the same ports' arrangement as the Gigabyte GeForce 8400 GS card. However, the dual-link DVI port supports dual-link HDCP. The GPU supports audio pass-through, availed via the use of a DVI-to-HDMI dongle.
Summary
A passively-cooled Radeon HD 3450 card that's performance-comprised by a slower-than-expected memory clocking.
