Need some opinions on cards for a home media center

[engineereeyore]

So, getting sick of cable cost and the fact that an increasing number of stations are putting content online, I've decided to kill the cable and hook my little server up to a flat-panel tv. I'm backing up all my DVD's onto the hard drive, so I can watch them that way. As for regular tv, I'll just catch whatever I want off the internet.

This being the case, I need to upgrade my little server to do this. Right now, I just have a ATI Ragefury Pro 128. I don't think that will cut it, so I'd like to know your opinion. If I wanted to also be able to play games from this server, should I buy a separate capture card (connected to antenna for local stations) and a separate video card for nice gaming, or is there a good balanced card that can do both really well?

What say you?

 

[Fraggable]

The ATI All-In-Wonder cards can do both gaming and TV tuning, but neither well. The X1900 AIW was the last one made and there won't be any more. The AIW cards are clocked lower than their normal counterparts, and the tuners on them aren't great. You're better off getting 2 separate cards if you have the budget and enough PCI/PCIe/AGP slots, though if you don't want to play the newest games at high resolutions, maybe the X1900 would be enough for you. I had a X800 AIW that was a nice card and played BF2 very well.

I am not aware of any other card that has a decent GPU and tuner on the same board.

 

[engineereeyore]

Yeah, about the latest and greatest game I want to play is BFME-II. I like it and Star Wars: Empire at War. I don't play much else, maybe UT2004 or Counter-Strike on occasion. So I think you're probably right to go with two cards.

 

[Fraggable]

For those games you'd be ok with even a X800 AIW I think, a X1900 would be good if you can find one. They're all kind of hard to find anymore.

Unless you want to play Oblivion or STALKER or Crysis or something like that, the X800 would be enough when paired with enough memory and CPU.