hi, i'm new to this forum and was wondering if its worth while upgrading from a geforce4 MX440 to a radeon 9200SE.
PVR comp current specs:
Athlon T-bird 1.2ghz
Hauppauge PVR 150
I'm wondering what sort of performance increase i would get in this upgrade, as I believe the radeon 9200 has a hardware mpeg2 decoder, where as the GF4mx440 only has hardware mpeg2 acceleration?
Quote:as I believe the radeon 9200 has a hardware mpeg2 decoder, where as the GF4mx440 only has hardware mpeg2 acceleration?
The radeon 9200 doesnt have a hardware MPEG2 decoder either. It does have some hardware accelleration features, but nothing too exciting.
ahh, thanks for the infomation
what video card would be a good upgrade over the GF4mx440?
As my PVR comp is also my network server it is under a heavy cpu load at times, which causes the live tv to be jerky unless i bump the cpu priority for GB-PVR upto high.
would having a hardware mpeg2 decoder would fix this problem?
Are you sure it's CPU cycles, and not hard drive access causing the jerkiness?
I'd do some serious investigating, before I splurged on a hardware mpeg-2 decoder of any type, when a second hard drive upgrade may be all that's needed.
thats a point
I have two hard drives in the machine, i'll test out some different configurations.
it could be todo with many programs reading and writing to the same os installed drive.
Definitely separate your recording/playback drive, from your OS drive.
This can solve a multitude of problems/annoyances, especially on multiple capture/tuner machines.
Also turn OFF your anti-virus on the recordings drive.
I'm with reboot about separating playback/recording from your os - solved a lot of jerkyness for me... I'm running the g4mx440 on a AMD 1ghz with 256mb ram and the picture quality is excellent even when recording and playing back at the same time - It just takes some tweaking
- The only issue I now have is overscan which I need to take a look at...
I did start by trying to use my 350 out - but no matter which drivers I used I was still getting lockups... TBH I can't tell the difference now and the ability to play dvds etc is much more useful.