6200 AGP vs. 2400 PRO PCI (Half-height)

[kume06]

Alright, I have an older PC (AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 512 mb RAM) that I am using for HTPC purposes. Which mostly consists of playing video content stored on other PCs in the house. To do this I am using Mediaportal and Purevideo for the codec. This PC seems to work well for most types of files except it all but chokes when trying to play a transport stream from recorded HD content (doesnt matter whether this is local or over the network). I currently have an Geforce 6200 AGP in the machine and have not found a clearly superior half-height AGP video card (if there is one let me know). I have come across an Radeon 2400 PRO PCI video card on newegg though. 2400 PRO ought to be clearly superior overall to a 6200...yet Im not sure that PCI connection wont change that around. Anyway, anyone here have any thoughts on if getting the 2400 PRO would be a worthwhile upgrade that may solve the HD playback issues? Also why does a 6200 have so much trouble with this when Ive had an even slower Athlon XP playback 1080i/720P content flawlessly under the same conditions but with an FX5700 installed? This has frustrated me for well over a year now. Thanks for any comments.

 

[TC91]

2400 pro, you get excellent HD video acceleration which i am pretty sure the 6200 does not have. i believe only the nv 8 series (except g80 8800's), and ati hd 2k series (except hd 2900's) and higher have full HD video acceleration support.

 

[ther00kie16]

The 6200 is the lowest card of the 6 series while the 5700 is a moderately high 5 series card so its specs are significantly better. I have old 9800pro and 9600xt from the same period and they can play 1080p because they were faster cards, even though they are from a really old line.
But I assume you have spotted this 2400. It is a very good choice for pure HTPC purposes.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: kume06
Also why does a 6200 have so much trouble with this when Ive had an even slower Athlon XP playback 1080i/720P content flawlessly under the same conditions but with an FX5700 installed?

The GF 6200 may actually be a victim of supporting more decoding features than FX5700. If the GF 6200 supports certain decoding features that FX5700 does not, but isn't really powerful or efficient enough to do them in hardware, its possible the FX5700 is off-loading that to the Athlon XP, which is able to do it faster than the GF 6200 can in hardware, or just not doing it at all with no perceptible impact on the result.

 

[kume06]

Thats an interesting theory. I vaguely recollect I may have read through a comparison of hte Purevideo performanc of the 7600GT and 7600GS in which it was shown that the lower clocked 7600GS had no significant impact on reducing CPU load. I have considered downgrading to an FX5200 for that reason. Just frustrating to find a card that everything is right about: cheap, new GPU, half height, fanlesss, but its a frickin' PCI card and not AGP. Oh well, does anyone know if ATI PCI cards have any driver issues compared to their PCI-E brethren?

 

[ther00kie16]

I had a ATi 7000 pci that didn't have any issues, but that was long ago. I don't see why the 2400 I linked to won't work unless you want to play games. It's PCI. It's half-height. And it should beat the 5200 in everything.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: kume06
I vaguely recollect I may have read through a comparison of hte Purevideo performanc of the 7600GT and 7600GS in which it was shown that the lower clocked 7600GS had no significant impact on reducing CPU load. I have considered downgrading to an FX5200 for that reason.

7600 GT and GS are the same GPU and core configuration (G73), just different clocks, so video decoding performance would hardly be affected. FX5700 and FX5200 have different core configurations (NV36 v. NV34) and other differences which may or may not significantly affect decoding performance.