Video card to playback HD

[mmatheny]

I have a Hauppauge WinTV 2250 on the way - what is the least video card that will play back HD material??

What is the suggested video card for this same purpose?

[morser]

I installed the AGP8x as well as the PCIe model of the ATI 1550x video card, and it performs HD playback NEAR perfect. once and awhile I get some triangle-like effects on the screen, but i attribute it to my front side bus being only 800mhz
The card i mentioned is only $50 or less, i've tried the HIS rebranded chip model as well as the original ATI brand.

My question here: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=38329 that i just posted is similar. Except that I am considering a barebone pc with onboard video, and wondering if it will do. I think so, but buying before trying is holding me back...

[mmatheny]

How about any nVidia cards?

[morser]

What brand?
the only Nvidia card i have is onboard Laptop Quadro NVS 110M. I'm afraid to even try it but I can if the model is similar to what you are trying... I'd have to verify that will be able to do 1080 horizontal resolution with an external monitor.

[mmatheny]

No particular brand/model - just wanting to know what chipset will handle HD efficiently. PCI-E - what's the lowest chipset that will work?

[elbryyan]

I believe it was the Nvidia 6600 that was the minimum recommended Nvidia card to play back HD. I would think the 7600 series or higher would be better though. Trying to go off the top of my head, the 8500-8600 series was created mainly for HD playback and offloads the processing to the GPU with the Purevideo decoder. Not sure if the other models do as well in thar regards. Again, thats just going from memory.

[Deusxmachina]

Yeah, anything 7600GT or better is good to go for sure with no worries. A 7600GT pretty much equates to an 8600GT with the 8600GT arguably having a slightly better picture, so shoot for an 8600GT or better. I have had a 7600GT and it was fine, currently have an 8500GT in there and it's fine, but even an 8600GT is so old now that it should be pretty cheap so there's little reason to get something lesser or older unless it's basically free.

My 2400pro was almost fine except it didn't have the oomph to accelerate mpeg2 and do better than Bob deinterlacing at the same time for 1080i. A 2400xt should be fine, though.

Cards are pretty cheap now all-around. Prices have really dropped the past year or so.

[zehd]

This seems like a good enough place to hijack !!!

So in general, HD playback needs a lot of grunt to play back HD content, but a decent video card can offload the grunt away from the CPU... Is that right?

K, a couple of questions... If I get a better HD card, how weak can my CPU RAM and MB be?

And what's to know if I want to play blueray?

[Deusxmachina]

This seems like a good enough place to hijack !!!

So in general, HD playback needs a lot of grunt to play back HD content, but a decent video card can offload the grunt away from the CPU... Is that right?

K, a couple of questions... If I get a better HD card, how weak can my CPU RAM and MB be?

And what's to know if I want to play blueray?

Newer cards can offload Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs, and can help with mpeg2, and I guess newer codecs can help accelerate other weird files, but I wouldn't rely on it at all. It's hard enough a lot of times for people to get acceleration working even on Blu-Ray. If a file isn't encoded properly, it won't get acceleration.

My e2140 was fine, and that's only 1.6ghz. Of course it easily overclocked to 2.8ghz and could go higher if I bothered to make sure it was stable higher than that, but I know it's stable at 2.8 and that's fast enough so I never touched it again. No reason nowadays to have anything less than a a low-end Conroe like that e2140 unless the stuff is pretty much free.

I can't remember who it is around here who said he's stopped helping people with low-end equipment because 95% of the time the problem is the equipment but the person keeps wanting to band-aid it and pray for miracles.

Look out for Blu-Ray with an HTPC. Plenty of threads on forums where people struggle with it for various reasons. Unless a person is going to dump it to the hard drive to not have to mess with the discs and copy protection anymore, a lot of people say to just buy a standalone. And if you have any interest in a PS3, that's probably the way to go. When copy protection screws over people who jump through all the hoops and it still won't work, there's a problem. YMMV.

[zehd]

I can't remember who it is around here who said he's stopped helping people with low-end equipment because 95% of the time the problem is the equipment but the person keeps wanting to band-aid it and pray for miracles.

haha