ATI Radeon HD 4350 and 4550: Great HTPC Solutions

Final Words

We generally complain endlessly about graphics cards that purport to bring 3D capability to the masses, as they more often than not just bring frustration and dissatisfaction to end users who expect to be able to play the latest games without feeling like they're viewing a bad mosaic or some impressionist paintings. And these cards are not cards for gaming, but each does have its uses when chosen for the strengths of the card.

This hardware is currently where it's at for HTPCs. Both the 4550 and 4350 support 8-channel LPCM over HDMI. For the HTPC user, this makes these cards a great combination audio and video solution that is cheap, flexible, quiet/silent, and fully capable of accelerating video playback and passing high quality audio out to your sound system. Honestly, getting a $40 sound card isn't something some people think twice about, but with the added benefit of video decode acceleration these new parts should be fairly attractive to the HTPC crowd.

While some integrated solutions can offer the above, choice and flexibility are great things to have in a system. Now HTPC builders have the option of a passively cooled 4550 that can meet their audio and video needs, or a low profile 4350 that is very quiet even if it isn't completely silent. Without the need for onboard audio or video (for a strictly HTPC system using HDMI), we could see a lot more interesting options come available to end users looking to hook something up to their television.

Honestly, we wish the 4350 was an integrated part on current motherboards (and we would really prefer to see it passively cooled, but we'll have to wait and see if any manufacturers alter the reference design on this one). While it isn't a card designed for gaming, it is capable of showing gamers what they are missing. The 4350 offers performance that, while lack luster, wouldn't be a horrendous chain on the neck of game developers. Offering settings that enable playable frame rates at 800x600 or 1024x768 at a bare minimum on the 4350 would really raise the bar in some cases and allow developers to focus on making their games look better and play better. End users who wanted to try one of the more hard core games could see if it was for them with out the added headache that the current group of horribly underpowered integrated solutions offer.

As for the 4550, it really isn't enough faster than the 4350 to put it into another class of product in terms of 3D. The larger PCB and passive cooling solution make it a better fit for some specific situations, but if we are making the choice for one of these cards on game performance, at this level its really not going to make a big difference. Both cards kind of suck for any real gaming. If you need a card that can really give you a taste of what PC gaming can be, you still want the option to use it as an HTPC card (with 8 channel LPCM), and you don't care about silence, the 4670 is where its at. It still won't get you all the way to gaming nirvana, but for low resolutions it can offer some satisfaction.

The NVIDIA 9500 GT is priced between the 4550 and the 4670, but it doesn't offer all the features we want to see on an HTPC card. Performance does fall between the 4550 and the 4670, but as these numbers (and the rest of the numbers in our 4670 article show), the 4670 is really in another class. If we are going to recommend that you spend more money on a part to get game performance, our recommendation isn't going to be to spend an extra $15 on an NVIDIA card that only offers a little bit of a boost over something that is already under powered. Our recommendation would be to spend the extra $30 and get the 4670 that offers the capability of playing games with all the options turned on and up at low resolution (well, except for Cyrsis, but not even high end parts can do that).

Anyway, the point is that with cards in this class, you can't expect gaming performance. And even still we have cards that absolutely blow away integrated graphics. This really does highlight just how how horrible the performance of integrated solutions really is in comparison to any modern add-in graphics part. But that doesn't mean these cards don't have some value. Not everyone needs 3D, and these cards are priced very well. And more importantly, these cards offer a real solution to a problem HTPC builders have been faced with for a long time. The Radeon 4350 and 4550 offer quiet or silent video acceleration for full resolution blu-ray playback with the option of enabling 8 channel LPCM audio playback over HDMI. If you want to build an HTPC, one of these cards would be a very good fit.