GF4MX440 to R9200SE - worth upgrading for mpeg2 hardware decoder?

[Clavain]

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?

[sub]

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.

[Clavain]

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?

[reboot]

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.

[Clavain]

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.

[reboot]

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.

[elite]

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.