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Need recomendations on video card and a few other components

shikhan

Senior member
I'm going to be building a simple, low budget HTPC - in a sense. It will only be outputing video for now, and perhaps in the future, I may (or very well may not) upgrade the system to record. But for now, that is off the table.

I'm planning on a Core 2 Duo E6300 with the Intel DP965LTCK for a MB. Since this mb doesn't have digital out sound, i will probably buy a cheap sound card down the line with digital out. This will cost me <$250. I'm aiming to buy the rest of the system for around another 250, maybe 350.

Right now, I need a video card, case, ram and perhaps a PS (I might have one in my spares that might work - it depends on how strong I will need it to be).

I will probably have about 1GB ram as I think that should be more than sufficent. The video card needs to be able to output 1366 x 768 over DVI for my TV, but this shouldnt be hard for any semi-modern video card. I'll primarily be using this to watch anime and other various shows, both in HD and SD so the video card shouldn't have problems decoding codecs. DVD content may be played over this system if it turns out to be better than my cheap DVD player.

So, essentially, I want a relativly quiet video card, 1GB ram, and case that can do the above for around 250-350. Suggestions?
 
sudhian.com did a roundup of video cards for a HTPC, see the articles page, May 06 (link) and a Radeon X1300 did a much better job of playback than a nvidia 7300GS.

But for real expertise you should check AVSForum.com
 
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