XFX ATI Radeon HD 5450

A few months ago I picked up a Radeon 5450. The main reason being that, at the time, this was one of the few cards that would bitstream audio out the HDMI port for a reasonable price. I picked one up for about $70.

I wanted HDMI audio for a couple of reasons:

1. I wanted to see/know/control exactly what was coming out of the computer audio wise. By sending the computer HDMI out to an A/V receiver first, I can see exactly what is coming out of the HDMI port. Most importantly, this allows me to verify when I am actually bitstreaming and when the audio is being converted to LPCM.

2. I wanted to split the HDMI out and also send it to the TV in the living room, thus making my pc an htpc and giving me another option for problematic playback. I picked up a 75-foot HDMI cable and an active splitter. This works surprisingly well.

This has all worked remarkably well considering this setup is a bit on the bleeding edge. But there are a few hiccups:
- Not all apps are up to speed at recognizing the video card as an audio card.
- Not all apps even conceive of the option of bitstreaming the audio instead of converting to LPCM first.
- the drivers still seem a bit buggy:  If I turn the monitor off, then back on, the display scales down for some reason. Usually, just opening the ATI control panel will pop it back. If I use the energy settings to turn the display off after some period of time, I can never get the display to come back on and must force a shutdown. This occurs when I'm splitting the HDMI output, so, to be fair, that may be the reason. I haven't tried it when not splitting the output.

I haven't had any problems with applications utilizing the card for hardware accelerated video decoding.

Overall, I'd say I'm glad I went this route.