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6600le for HTPC?

T

twonine

Junior Member
I am looking for a card for my HTPC thats under $100. No games, just tv and dvds.

Will the 6600le work for HDTV(for future purchase of an HDTV..1080p), or should I try and fleabay a 6600gt? Or is there something from ATI?
pci express only, prefer fanless but it does not have to be

thanks
 
For TV and DVDs and no games you'd be fine with even a 6200 or even a x300, and HDTV output will work fine with those as well. HD decoding on the other hand takes a pretty fast CPU to do well or a card that can handle it in hardware.
 
Watching OTA /QAM HDTV does not take a fast CPU. Just TV or DVDs doesn't take much either (though if you wanted to use ffdshow on your DVDs, you will want something decent). That said, your choice of video card is fairly important depending on the software you plan on using to view it. If it allows you to use overlay mode, just about any remotely modern GPU (including the most recent integrated ones) will work. If you have to use a video mixing renderer (like in MCE), you'll need something faster than a X300 to do it. You've got a bunch of different choices depending on how far along you are with your HTPC build.
 
I have a dell dimension 9100 with pentium d 2.8ghz and windows mce. It has a x300se, but I thought that this card was probably not going to be enough for hdtv 1080p.
 
You're best off waiting until you exceed the limits of your current hardware before upgrading. Depending on your decoders and how you've got things set up, you might be good until you try to tune OTA HDTV in MCE. But until you buy a OTA HDTV card, you won't know for sure. The longer you wait, the better hardware you'll be able to buy, and for less.
 
For what its worth I'm using a 5200. I have no problems playing back 1080i 60fps, although my TV is 720p. Just make sure you use a MPEG2 decoder that uses hardware assist. Cyberlink works fine, and its free via k-Lite codec pack. I started out using Elecard, and SD was fine, but would stutter bad on playback. Was about to buy a 6600 till I figured out the decoder was crap.
 
There are discussions in other web sites concerning the ATi cards not able to out put 1080p properly on their 1080P sets (not too many out there yet). Those people replaced them with 6600GT's w/o problems. May be true for all sets or future sets.

also .......issues with this.
 
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