HTPC budget card

Lower end cards generally do not have all the hardware acceleration / video enchancement of mid or higher end cards. The HD 4650 (~ $55) offers the best video quality of many "HTPC" cards tested; it tied for first place with the HD 4670 and 9600GT.
 
normally there is a cable that goes from your sound card to the video card to do the HDMI sound out.
 
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10802

Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution4

Integrated AMD Xilleon™HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S- video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation

Would the integrated HDTV encode imply hardware accelleration? Also sounds like I don't need a seperate cable?
 
For more gaming related, a 4650 or 4670 both work will, since they have the power to run almost anything at 720p without issues.

the ati 4 series does full 7.1 out, passed through the pci-express port, no cables needed.

There are a couple of 4650 low profile, however none are passively cooled.

That particular card appears to be a steal after the rebate, if you don't want to do any modern gaming, especially since it appears to be identical speed wise to the 4550 card.
 
Right.

This will be dedicated to HTPC use only. Maybe the occasional facebook poker game at most.

Thanks.
 
4350 and 4550 are identicle cards except for the memory, they both do hardware acceleration on HD video. You don't need a cable, these don't have the connection the poster was talking about.

Only reason I have a 4550 is because that was the only one left in stock at newegg and was passively cooled, I ended up paying $5 more for DDR3 over DDR.
 
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