What Video Card Is Good for HTPC Uses???

[Jay]

Pretty much the same except for the mfg.

[Marbles_00]

Well, here is one serious contender now:
http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.ph ... 99.243.272

After the mail-in rebate, it isn't much more expensive than the 2400pro I linked to before, and it includes the DVI-HDMI adapter (not that it matters now...but should I ever decided to run audio via HDMI, then this adapter could be a god-sent). I found a review here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... 00pro.html

which indicates that the fan is pretty quite...and judging by its description, uses that Smart Guard (or whatever it is called) that will adjust the fan speed in accordance to GPU use/Temperature. Overall, Xbit gave it a pretty decent review.

[Jay]

Nice

[Marbles_00]

Jay/Pittaway,

Do you guys do any of those reg tweaks indicated on the AVSforum, or do the latest CCC drivers already incorporate most of those tweaks. Just wondering how much the current CCC drivers suck.

[Jay]

No tweaking here.
The ATI Catalyst driver included on the CD had issues, but I loaded the latest one and all was well.
Running Vista Home Premium.

[Marbles_00]

Well I got the HD2600Pro. Installed it last night. I don't have a proper SATA drive right now, but I was itching to power up the system, so I had an older IDE drive just to use temporarily. Well, I went to power up the system...NOTHING!

Long story short (no pun intended), there was a almost short circuit (measured ~9 ohms on the multi-meter) between an Aux 12V to ground on a 4-pin Molex connector. Found out that this is used to apply power to the PCI-E slot (for sure the GPU fan). Well thinking it was a motherboard problem (which it could very well be), I pulled everything off to package it up...took one last measurement on that connector...Open circuit .

I then re-installed the CPU and found that closing down the locking tab on the CPU slot caused this short to appear. So the motherboard is going back to see if there is a problem...and I may as well get the CPU replaced. I figure (more like I'm hoping) that everything else should be okay as all the current would have gone through that path.

I've put together many computers...but this one I was really looking forward to. A very dis-heartening night to say the least .

[Jay]

[Marbles_00]

Got the asus eah2600pro. Got a new motherboard. Learned not to shy away from asus from now on. I've built many computers...and have used boards other than asus only twice. My music-server is using a chaintech socket 478, and I was going to use an MSI for the HTPC. The MSI was a bust...as I indicated a short circuit above, so now I'm using a simple M2N-X board. Not a board for gaming...though that is not the intended purpose. The only other disappointment was the lack of a GigLAN, but as of right now, I don't have a use for it as I'm not to the point of streaming HD content. The CPU I had checked over and it was working fine. So I quickly pieced together everything, and so far it looks great. A little noisier than I would like. I think it is the GPU fan, so I will have to address that in the future. I'm still working on tweaking the system, and I have to get a proper SATA drive (currently just using a 6.4 Gig IDE drive I had sitting around...which is fine for the OS and Xlobby software but not for ripping movies of course).

So right now I'm pretty happy with how things are going. Strange, back when playing around with the music-server prior to having it for that use, I connected it to my Panny RPTV and using a Radeon 9500 pro, I was able to use 1366x768. When trying 1920x1080 I would have major overscanning. With this 2600 pro, I have the display set up at 1920x1080 no problems...no overscan at all. Anyways, check my googlepages out in the near future for updated pics, and a quick video showing Mirage in live action.

[S Pittaway]

i am a bit confused about the resulution, if 1366x768 is the native res why drive it at 1920x1080?

[Marbles_00]

That's the thing, the TV specs only indicate that it is 1080i, 480p or 480i...it doesn't state anywhere that it downsamples or anything. Maybe it was the CCC drivers used at the time with the 9500pro, but when I tried a 1080 res before, I had over-sampling, so I downed the res to 1366x768, and that seemed to display fine (using Bud's Redeux WS skin back then). Using the HD2600, along with the 8.3 CCC drivers, the RPTV is connected via DVI-HDMI cable (same way I was connecting before), the drivers automatically setup the cards res to 1920x1080 and I didn't have to do any adjustments in the CCC drivers what-so-ever. I only had to play around with them to setup a second monitor, which I was using to tweak some other things, but now I'm only using the RPTV.

Also, last night after setting up ffdshow properly to upscale DVD to 1920x1080, all I can say is WOW!!! I'm loving this more and more.

I have to tear myself away from playing, so I can update my googlepages with pictures and video.