Recommendations for HTPC video card please.

[jay]

Need a dual monitor card with HDMI/1080P to HDTV and at least VGA to touch screen.
PCI Express X16. No gaming.

Recommendations?
Thanks :blink:

 

[CollinR]

I reccomend one of the Nvidia 85/8600 variants.

Me personally I have an MSI NX8600GTS, which is PCIx16, HDCP, has HDMI and DVI-D (includes VGA adapter), it also has headers for SPDIF to patch into the HDMI cable. IIRC I paid $69 at Newegg last year.

 

[jay]

Thanks Collin, I'll check it out.

 

[GraysonPeddie]

Why not an MSI R4350-D256H video card?

You consume less energy with Radeon HD 3450-based video cards.

 

[CollinR]

#1 Reason is it's an ATI.

Reason is I do actually look at the specs and I expect it to do everything the specs say it can. From my past issues with ATI I have no faith in their specs being real with the actual drivers they distribute. I got burned by them many years ago and I have not let it go, and I don't plan to anytime soon either.

If you wanna compare power consumption all of them are a joke compared to the hardware clients used with SageTV. The only time thats not true is if you only own 1 TV.

 

[GraysonPeddie]

Well then, there's always 8400/9400 out there.

 

[CollinR]

8400 and 8800 don't support h.264 AVC HD video like the 85/8600 does, dunno about the 9400 as it hasn't been around as long.

 

[jay]

I have a message into a 3rd party Amazon merchant who is advertizing a
"Geforce 8600GTS Pcie 256MB VGA 2X Dvi Tv Out Oc Version by MSI"
$59.99 + $5.99 shipping.

It looks like there are variants of this board if you look at Amazon offerings so I want to make sure I have the right outputs.

 

[GraysonPeddie]

Oh, okay. My 780G chipset in the motherboard has a Unified Video Decoder, which supports playback of Blu-Ray movies through hardware video acceleration.

 

[CollinR]

GP- So whats your CPU load and which disk?

Also is BR all you plan to do?

Jay-
You might hold out for the HDMI version so you can do SPDIF passthrouh to the display if you chosoe to in the future. Also you can connect it to a SS reciever that has basic HDMI switching.

Still $59 is pretty cheap.

 

[jay]

Collin, the guy got back to me and said there is only one DVI output and the other is S-Video (TV Out). I do see 2 DVI outputs on Amazon's pic.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/pr...TF8&index=2

So, I'm befuddled.

 

[sky-chicken]

I am using the 7600 nvidea with dual monitor (touchscreen 1080p) and 65" Sharp in "nvidea" clone mode with Windows Vista Ultimate and I have to say "what a nightmare"

1) My TV is connected to an 2x4 matrix switch (monprice) but this does not matter.
2) everytime I turn my TV off for more than a day the nvidea driver switches to single monitor and when i turn on the TV i have "RELOAD" the setup file to make it a dual in "clone"mode. This happens from driver version 168.xx to current 178.xx for windows Vista. I am not sure if this is Vista or an Nvidea problem. However when using clone mode ... good luck.

 

[GraysonPeddie]

GP- So whats your CPU load and which disk?

Also is BR all you plan to do?

Motherboard: ECS A780GM-A 780G chipset
Processor: AMD Athlon 4050e Processor
RAM: 2GB DDR2-533 RAM (if I remember right)
Hard Drive: WD Green Power 750GB 5400-7200 RPM
Graphics: On-board Radeon HD 3200 (256MB shared memory)
Windows Vista Ultimate with Aero turned on

Software: PowerDVD 7.3 (Aero turns off by PowerDVD when playing Blu-Ray)
Movie: Chronicles of Narnia: The Witch, The Lion, and The Wardrobe (Blu-Ray)
Audio Selection: Uncompressed Audio
Chapter Testing: They're After Us

Hardware Acceleration: On
Memory: 981 MB Used
CPU Usage: 29% to 55%, 40% average, lowest dip: 24% (dipped only once), highest peak: 68% (peaked only once for the second time of watching the chapter)

Hardware Acceleration: Off
Memory: 982 MB Used
CPU Usage: 28% to 60% (although it doesn't really hit the lows or highs that much), 42% average, lowest dip: 25%, first highest peak: 78% (didn't occur for the second time I watched the same chapter)

Summary: I'm not sure if I made a fair comparison, but hardware acceleration or not, I did not see any effect of the CPU usage, which I might be thinking that it's done by the unified video decoder. A little bit of CPU drop might help with the hardware acceleration turned on. This is with video almost maximized since I only have one HDTV to see my CPU usage.

I might try out H.264 AVC HD video to see how well the 780G chipset can do.

And I've got to wonder: How can GeForce 8400 does not support H.264 AVC HD video codec?

 

[gacevich]

does anybody have a view regarding the video processor being built-in the motherboard? i am in the market to upgrade the processing power of my htpc and have seen options to have the video processor built into the mb. yeah, you can't upgrade it but if you get a "beefy" processor it should last for a few years.

 

[jay]

After a lot of effort, I got my ATI 2400 HD series board to do what I wanted on Vista.
The Catalyst control panel's monitor cloning didn't work. I have a wide screen Dell monitor set at it's native 1680 x 1050. When I envoked cloning, the 1024 x 768 4:3 touch screen substitute monitor reported out of range.

I got a copy of UltraMon which refused to clone/mirror at all. However!, they posted a beta 3.0.3 ver for Vista users that does. It scales the original screen to fit the smaller one.

Will now order some touch screens.

UltraMon: http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/
Touch screens, 8 & 10 in.: http://www.gooddeals18.com/c=GfaNzz8udPAlK...creen__VGA.html