Dazed and Confused !! which ATI card to buy for TV-out

[zobskyX]

Hi,

on a previous post, ... I asked about opinions on video cards for building a home theater PC. Well the PC is now up and running hooked up to my TV. I currently have it running with a friend's (built by ATI) radeon 9000 and the DVD / AVI quality is really quite nice through the S-video output(although webpage quality sucks somewhat, ..no matter what res / brightness / contrast etc ... i tweak). My HTPC runs Win2000 (no XP for me)


question(s):
1. i want to maintain the same quality of video but absolutely do not care about gaming on this PC (all my gaming money goes into my other PCs). does ATI use the same tv-out chips on their lower end cards (like the 7000 and the 7500)? If so, could i possibly get the radeon 7000, selling for as little as $30+ on the web???

2. i heard various opinions on this forum that the sapphire cards are better than powercolor cards, ..and both are inferior to original ATI. any one done an actual comparison. Remember, .... this card is mainly for TV-out.

3. i read somewhere on the web that the OEM (built by ATI) cards don't come with software to take advantage of ATI's hardware DVD decoding. Please tell me this isn't so. If it is, would I not be better off just getting a lower end NVdia MX chip with TV-out?


I guess that, at this point, I'm looking for SPECIFIC tried & tested recommendations, not just a broad idea, like in my last post.

Cheers All,
Vin

 

[Confused]

Web pages/text will look rubbish on a TV no matter which card, unless of course the TV is a nice HDTV and you're using component or VGA in!


Not sure whether the same chips are used on lower-end cards, and I haven't used any to compare, so can't help you there!


Confused

 

[Rogozhin]

OEM cards (or powered by ati) come with powerdvd that uses the dvd hardware accel on the cards.

If you go with a Built by ati you would get their in house dvd player which is very good.

Powerdvd looks wonderful on my 9700 non pro and it looked wonderful on my 8500LE

I don't know for sure what the specs are on the lower end cards but if you check out ati's website they should list the specs (I'd look at the radeon 7500 series).

good luck

rogo

 

[zobskyX]

bump, ... attempting to squeeze the last remainging drops of knowledge out of this thread.

any more thoughts?

Vin

 

[rbV5]

1. The 7000, 7500 and 9000 use a subset of the rage theater chip embedded in the core and have similar TV-out capabilities, I'd get a 7500 or 9000 due to 7000's lower bandwidth RAMDAC, but that won't be an issue for 480i output.
2. Sapphire is a subsidiary of PC Partner who built the vast majority of "built by" ATI cards over the last 6 years or so, but that doesn't mean that Sapphire Cards = ATI cards, it just means they know how to make ATI cards. I own and have owned several ATI cards all "built by" ATI and their quality is excellent. I've heard the same about both Sapphire and Powercolor. Remember the TV-out instruction set is embedded in the core of Radeon value chips (7000, 7500, 9000, 9600) hard for an OEM to screw with that.
3. Thats not true. They may have different software, but it should ship with PowerDVD (OEM) which does support Radeons acceleration. Always contact your vendor for a list of the software pack to be certain.

My experience using both analog and digital HTPC's is that you will not get acceptable web browsing or text rendering using 480i output no matter what you do,....usable ...not for me anyway. Using a higher bandwidth connection like VGA (I'm using HD-15 for my HTPC) and high bandwidth component (I'm using AIW 9700's native component also) hooked to a higher resolution digital display is the way to go. Unless you go that route, don't get carried away throwing a bunch of money at it. My "media junior" rig uses an AIW 7500 which is perfectly acceptable for 480i output, and every bit as good using s-video output as my AIW 9700 pro.

would I not be better off just getting a lower end NVdia MX chip with TV-out?

Maybe, the GF4MX series is the best in the GF4 line for video playback and I've heard good things about NVDVD ( I wasn't impressed with some screenshot comparisons, however it is difficult to truly judge actual quality of video display using static images) . IIRC like they support TV-Tool also which is supposed to enhance the output capabilities...worth a look IMHO.

Also beware that if you use only a TV as your display, you'll need to keep a monitor handy in case an application changes your refresh rate or resolution to something unsupported by your TV. You may need the monitor to boot back into windows to adjust your settings back. Myself, I prefer XP, but to each his own

Good Luck!

 

[zobskyX]

thanks, ... exactly the info i needed, ...

i think i will buy a lower end OEM ATI card from a reputable vendor (newegg maybe). if the TV-out quality on AVIs/ SVDs is acceptable and comparable to the 9000 I currently have in the HTPC, I'll keep the OEM card. Else, I'll just go shell out a few more dead presidents and get an original ATI card.

I guess others may be interested in this experiment, so I'll post back when I'm doe with this experiment.

Watch this Space.