Most motherboards are equipped with one or more PCIe x16 slots for graphics cards. But there are motherboards, especially smaller ones, that doesn’t have these expansion possibilities. Graphics card maker HIS has taken advantage of this and launched a Radeon HD 4350 card that use the limited PCIe x1 format. PCIe x1 ports are commonly seen even with smaller motherboards and doesn’t need as much space, while the bandwidth is only a fraction of PCIe x16.
The PCIe x1 format has a maximal data transfer rate of 250MB/s, and for comparison the old PCI bus can do 133MB/s while PCIe x16 reaches 2133MB/s at most.
A PCIe x1 bus will be quite limiting for most graphics cards, but AMD’s Radeon HD 4350 is a quite timid circuit that doesn’t need a juicy bus to do its job. Fittingly, HIS has gone with a low-profile design, the same clock frequencies as the reference (600/800MHz, GPU and memory) and 512MB memory so the performance should be sufficient for HTPC systems and alike.
It comes with D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs and a minimal cooler, alas with a fan. The prices is not as exciting as the card as a whole though, over $100 which is three times higher than the same card with the PCIe x16 interface.
