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Hybrid Crossfire over 4200 for HTPC? Worth it?

jacktesterson

jacktesterson

Diamond Member
I have a Powercolor 5770 PCS+ Video card in my HTPC which is Overkill. This machine is strictly used for storage and Media playback on my TV, and 80% of my stuff is 720p content.

I use x264 MKVs and Blu Ray discs.

The 5770 is very loud. It has a noisy fan and its a known issue with this card from Powercolor (Its a factory overclocked model with a non reference fan). It has a bios update out to fix the card, but says "do at your own risk as problems have been reported after updating".

I'd like to part ways with the 5770 PCS+ just to reduce noise.

Should I stick with my IGP ATI 4200 graphics, or is it worth while or pointless to stick a 3450 in it for $40 to hybrid crossfire it for discrete graphics.
 
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IIRC, something a bit beefier than a super-low-end GPU is best for an HTPC. I read somewhere that an HD 5570 is the perfect HTPC card at the moment, and you should be able to sell your 5770, buy a 5570, and end up with $50-75 cash in your pocket or so at the end.
 
Sorry for the pointless thread guys.

I'd preferto keep the 5770 so I'm going to look for some other ways to quiet the system. The issue with this particular model card is high fan speeds even at idle, which is unnecessary since the system and card is cool. I was unaware of this when I bought it.
 
Bigystyle said:
I have a Powercolor 5770 PCS+ Video card in my HTPC which is Overkill. This machine is strictly used for storage and Media playback on my TV, and 80% of my stuff is 720p content.

I use x264 MKVs and Blu Ray discs.

The 5770 is very loud. It has a noisy fan and its a known issue with this card from Powercolor (Its a factory overclocked model with a non reference fan). It has a bios update out to fix the card, but says "do at your own risk as problems have been reported after updating".

I'd like to part ways with the 5770 PCS+ just to reduce noise.

Should I stick with my IGP ATI 4200 graphics, or is it worth while or pointless to stick a 3450 in it for $40 to hybrid crossfire it for discrete graphics.
Click to expand...


Any reason why your 4200 all by itself is unable to play stuff back? I thought 4200s could hardware decode blu-ray but I could be wrong.
 
Bigystyle said:
Yep it can.

What about playing 1080p rips? Isn't it mostly CPU drivin?
Click to expand...

It depends on whether your playback software can use DXVA or not and how the rip was encoded. I'm assuming x264. I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC) and it works fine with my HD3200 (which is an older version of your HD4200) when playing back x264 files. There will still be some CPU usage but significantly less than if you had no hardware acceleration.

Edit because I misspelled it as DVXA the first time. Ugh.
 
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Can you use afterburner to manually control the fan and clocks?

I have a slim case (sig) and after customizing the fan profile, it's very quiet except gaming for an hour or two.

Edit: Even a 3450 is fine for decoding video content, but I like to use the "Sharpen Complex" shader and it can't do that at 24-30fps in certain files. The onboard 4290 might fare similarly, but it's no trouble for my 5750 of course.
 
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fuzzymath10 said:
Can you use afterburner to manually control the fan and clocks?

I have a slim case (sig) and after customizing the fan profile, it's very quiet except gaming for an hour or two.
Click to expand...

Good idea, I use GPU Clock Tool to overclock my IGP so I bet Afterburner can do the same for HD4200s.
 
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