MSI Radeon HD 6450 - Good budget card for R600g?

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Originally Posted by bridgman

Just be glad you didn't mention BSD ;)

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Or Lennart Poettering. :p

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Originally Posted by RussianNeuroMancer

It's not true. Where I live electricity cost 0.7RUR/kWh (around 0.017EUR/kWh). I think it's cheap - I'm wrong?

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Where I live (outside Toronto, Canada) it's about 0.18 CDN per KWh, or about 0.14 EUR, not including taxes. If you look at the bill it says more like 0.10/KWh for the electricity, but there's another 0.07/KWh added for delivery and 0.01/KWh for "debt retirement charge" so it adds up pretty fast.

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Originally Posted by crazycheese

You have no idea.
1st "vote with your wallet" is not an illusion. The GPU and driver type will display in every statistic - for example on upcoming Steam stat.
Passive cooling is best thing you can do, because it reduces noise, vibrations, EMI and amount of dust pumped through the tower. Still, if one would go for passive cooling, its better to either watercool to huge passive radiator or use an all-Cu case and connect every component to it by means of heatpipes. For machines with lower energy drain, passive is definately better than fan cooling, if its working.

Also, AMD GPUs are much more energy efficient and with larger field of usage than that of Nvidia. Nvidias are strict gaming cards.
Electricity is cheap my ass, perhaps if you live in Bagamas. In EU the average cost is now 25 eurocent/kWh, three years before it was ~17 eurocent.

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If the AMD card is 'working.' Yeah, that's the key, isn't it? ;)

I still read on here that these cards are not working with the open source driver and you eliminate the option of using hardware decoding right off the bat by virtue of it being AMD. So much for open source when you can't even use the features the card is supposed to have. How well does the acceleration work?

I would try to find a used GTX 460 (1GB if possible). There should be some floating around and that way, you get VDPAU (I like AMD, but I get the feeling pigs will fly before their damned lawyers allow them to really open up UVD).

6450 TDP - 18W
GTX 460 TDP - needs its own nuclear plant (I kid, I kid)

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Originally Posted by Panix

If the AMD card is 'working.' Yeah, that's the key, isn't it? ;)

I still read on here that these cards are not working with the open source driver and you eliminate the option of using hardware decoding right off the bat by virtue of it being AMD. So much for open source when you can't even use the features the card is supposed to have. How well does the acceleration work?

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These cards work with opensource driver. The 3D performance currently is "acceptable": http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...RA-1212312RA16 This 260GTX were mine. The 4core CPUs across the board deliver near same performance, so you can judge.

Yes, no video acceleration currently, this relies on CPU. But I personally found out that it is better to accelerate every codec, than only bunch of them. I wait for working HSA/OpenCL which claimed to be opensource.
The GPUs recieve a lot of attention recently on all opensource drivers. So its my choice, but everyone has to choose himself.

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Originally Posted by DanL

I would try to find a used GTX 460 (1GB if possible). There should be some floating around and that way, you get VDPAU (I like AMD, but I get the feeling pigs will fly before their damned lawyers allow them to really open up UVD).

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These comments are very weird. I don't know if it's jest or what...

The guy is asking for a new Mini, you guys are recommending buying a used vintage Ferrari Testarossa off ebay.

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Originally Posted by Panix

I still read on here that these cards are not working with the open source driver and you eliminate the option of using hardware decoding right off the bat by virtue of it being AMD. So much for open source when you can't even use the features the card is supposed to have. How well does the acceleration work?

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Panix is still reading the internet, so he remains the ultimate authority telling us AMD users what works and what doesn't :D

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Originally Posted by Panix

I still read on here that these cards are not working with the open source driver and you eliminate the option of using hardware decoding right off the bat by virtue of it being AMD. So much for open source when you can't even use the features the card is supposed to have. How well does the acceleration work?

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A little advice Panix - learn to stage your battles. Only post this crap in a thread which was not already started with a presumption of contentment with the R600g drivers.

The features I want from the card work. That is why I consider buying them.

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Originally Posted by Hamish Wilson

Still, I have heard some bad things about the 6450, so I wanted to ask if anyone has some experience with the card.

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Mesa -git (i.e. 9.1-devel) supports the HD6450 very well. However, Fedora 17 ships with only Mesa 8.0.4 and an old version of libdrm. Hopefully Fedora 18 will address both of these issues, but Mesa 8.0.4 cannot even run OpenGL xscreensavers correctly on an HD6450. Nor can it run Minecraft 1.4.6. But it can run World of Warcraft, bizarrely enough - at approx 20-30 fps at 1280x1024.