New Video Card Or VGA To S-Video/Composite Converter

[MoMeanMugs]

I have some parts sitting around including dual PIII Xeon 500's and a Voodoo 5 PCI. I wanted to put together a system and hook it up to my TV (soon to be projector) and 6.1 surround system in my living room. Would it be worth my while to buy a Radeon 7500 or 8500 with TV-out or just get a scan converter and use the Voodoo 5? This will be only for gaming purposes. I heard that using TV-out on a video card really taxes the system. To what extent is this true? The last video card I had with TV-out was a Voodoo Rush and that was no speed demon to begin with. Keep in mind that most scan converters only accept up to 1024x768 res so I won't be running any insane res (also including the fact that it wouldn't be pushed well by 500 Mhz). I will be using a free copy of Win XP I got from Microsoft if the OS matters (wouldn't see why it would). Has anyone had any experience with scan converters? Any info you guys would like to comment on would be most appreciated.

 

[MoMeanMugs]

Someone plz gimme some feedback...

 

[eplebnista]

Hello,

IMO you might as well get the Radeon 7500(if you're talking about AGP), as it costs about the same as the scan converters that I'm familiar with. Also you'd have better driver support for XP as it is a current product and most likely better picture quality too.

eplebnista

 

[MoMeanMugs]

The only thing I was thinking about was performance hit from using TV-out vs scan converter.

 

[eplebnista]

Hello,

I believe that their would be little or no degradation in performance above the normal usage of the 7500, as it has two independent display drivers on the board for two displays. I think the older dualhead cards used a single display driver and that is what caused the performance hit you mentioned.

Here is link to the Radeon 7500 FAQ.

eplebnista