Just watch for driver support. ATI have broken the AGP support in their latest drivers, so not sure how PCI will ne handled. (I have the 2600 AGP, and it's sometimes flakey)
If you run into an HIS version, I have one, it has a fan, but if anyone can hear the fan on it they have better ears than I do. Temp is usually around 30 degrees. I think the fanless versions tend to run 20 degrees higher than that. Just another option.
How well does the card run? Does it accelerate mpeg2 and HD content ok?
Random ramblings...
Read the 100+ page "2400/2600/2900 owners' thread" thread over at avsforum for all you want to know. If you start with the latest posts and go backwards, you can be up to date without reading the entire thing and suffering through the first 50 or 70 pages of problems/fixes because ATI writes crappy drivers. Nvidia does too, but they're crappy in different ways. As I type that, I don't know what sub programs, but I hope he doesn't work for ATI or Nvidia's driver teams and now I made him feel bad.
The 2400pro isn't powerful enough to accelerate mpeg2 and use better than Bob to deinterlace 1080i at the same time. If you're in the UK, I don't think you get 1080i mpeg2, so if you don't, that probably isn't a concern. And not everyone cares about deinterlacing with better than Bob. The 2400xt and 2600pro should be powerful enough.
2400pro has mpeg2 acceleration off by default. Read up on the driver/registry hacks in the avsforum thread. They made an .exe file so the hacks are easy to use.
I don't know how fast those CPUs you have are, but my Core2Duo at 1.6ghz did 1080p fine without any hardware help. I say that to set up the following:
Personally, I think the onboard chip for h.264 acceleration is a bit of a joke. These and the Nvidia cards apparently only accelerate h.264 if you use PowerDVD or a limited number of other viewers. I think someone on here said GBPVR does accelerate them with that card, so maybe as long as PowerDVD or whatever is installed, GBPVR uses the decoders the same way.
Regardless, it may not like some oddball types of h.264, such as various things you might download from a non-commercial party. (x.264?) Apparently works great with HDDVD and Blu-Ray, assuming you use PowerDVD or whatever. (Read that avsforum thread for more.)
A Core2Duo is powerful enough to not need any acceleration help, so I didn't care much about any of that. I even tossed my old 7600GT into my HTPC last week to see if I like it better. I think the drivers are a little less crappy (using Windows XP) for various reasons, and it's a more powerful card overall, so it's probably staying. Can't say either one is much different just watching videos, though.
So these newer cards have the chip for h.264, but they probably won't always work, so people will want a decent CPU in there anyway, in which case they probably don't need the onboard chip in the first place.
In some old posts I talk about the stutters I was getting with the card. It maxed out doing Bob on 1080i at 1600x1200. I had mpeg2 acceleration off, but it looked to be accelerating anyway, which I didn't want. A lower resolution brought the gpu usage down enough to not stutter, but that's not much of a fix.
An AVSforum guy said it should even Vector Adaptive deinterlace fine if I have mpeg2 acceleration off. After playing the same files in other video players, I realized it was only overloading the gpu in GBPVR, which makes no sense since the other players besides VLC should have been using the same codecs/decoders. I "fixed" that by setting deinterlace to Weave and hooking it to a 1080i HDTV.
I put a 2900pro in my non-HTPC the other week, so I have some personal experience with that card, too.
Bottom line: I'm not impressed by the 2400pro. Even if it was more powerful like the 2400xt or 2600, the drivers are a pain, (maybe they're better now from a couple months ago), the onboard h.264 acceleration chip doesn't always work, and it's pretty lousy with games. If I didn't have that maybe-just-my-bad-luck GPU overloading problem with GBPVR, I'd think much more highly of it. I've read the Nvidia cards have their share of problems, too.
Mine's the HIS with a fan, and it's quiet, the price is pretty good on them, and they have excellent hardware deinterlacing if you can get it to work right, so there's that. I also had a problem getting ANY hardware deinterlacing working with GBPVR. Tried like six different decoders and I think only one let the video card settings do anything. Maybe I missed a setting somewhere in the decoders, but there's not exactly a lot of settings in most of them.
Some potentially great technology in the cards, but potential is sometimes only that. Anyone wanting to watch 1080 HD, whatever they do I recommend having the backup plan of getting a cheap Core2Duo for $75 or so, a $50+ motherboard if you need one, and then your computer can do pretty much anything you want.
edit: wow, more random ramblings than I thought. Had a cat on my lap so I couldn't go anywhere anyway. I think it's Stu who also has a 2400 with problems, so look for his posts, too.
I'm fairly certain that you won't be getting hardware acceleration using anything but overlay mode in GBPVR.exe to work with a PCI card.
I can't even get SD mpeg2 on 1.4 ghz celeron & a PCI nvidia 6200 to play below %80 CPU using PVRX2.
I had to go back to GBPVR.exe in overlay & then I get around %15.
I recently had a similar problem. I brought a 5200 with which hardware acceleration worked flawlessly. Unfortunately my 60 watt PSU couldn't cope.
I then brought a 6200 which was ok with my power supply but I couldn't get hardware acceleration to work. I believed it is disabled on the card and thus will never work.
So I then brought a 10 quid Geforce MX 4000. Low profile fanless card. Hardware acceleration works perfectly (with the reight codec).
My gut feeling is that it is perfectly possible to have hardware acceleration it just depends if the manufacturer decides to enable it or not.
I have an ATI 2400 Pro AGP and compared it to my ATI 9550 AGP card for HD playback. Basically they were the same, with no detectable difference in CPU utilization. They are both OK for 720P, but not quite up to 1080i on my system. But I am using WinXP. I think that Sub said you need Vista to get the acceleration working for the newer cards. And you need .NET 3.0 also. I went back to my 9550 so that I could use the PowerDVD software that came with it. And as Deusxmachina said, it depends a lot on which decoder software you use. Maybe the PowerDVD works best, but that is something of a guess. At least I can get the CyberLink decoder to work with GB-PVR. Other tweaks may be required.
JimF Wrote:But I am using WinXP. I think that Sub said you need Vista to get the acceleration working for the newer cards.
I definitely had mpeg2 hardware acceleration with XP. The problem was I didn't want mpeg2 hardware acceleration.
I hadn't looked up that board before.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article780-page1.html Tiny. Pretty cool, if you can get it to do what you want. Doesn't the UK use h.264 for (upcoming?) broadcast HDTV and mpeg2 is only for 576i SD? Just thinking, at the worst, that this board/CPU can do 576i even without video card acceleration, so then the only worry would be getting the h.264 UVD chip to work right.
I need to rethink what I said earlier about no hardware acceleration on my 6200 PCI & PVRX2 under vmr9
I did a fresh install of XP on that system & just for the heck of it tried PVRX2.
I'm getting hardware acceleration now.:confused:
I'm pulling about %25 cpu for DVD playback.
The menu is jerky unless I use fullscreen exclusive then no problems.
I'll install a tuner card & see how that works.
I wonder if my past XP install was hosed or if the latest nvidia drivers had something to do with it.