PIII 800EB

[CalvinHobbs]

hi guys/gals. well i've got a PIII 800EB with 320MB of memory, i wanna use it as a dvd player, only thing missing is a graphic card with tv out, well if you guys could point out a cheap card with tv out that'll give a image on my tv, i'll only use it to play movies, it'll contain only windows xp and power dvd. any help would be highly appreciated. thanks people.

 

[Promethply]

The GeForce 6200 AGP with Video Out would probably be your best, as nVidia enables "PureVideo" on this GPU as well.

 

[CalvinHobbs]

good idea but don't think it falls in the cheap category, still thanks for the hint

 

[bluemax]

Any ATI card, Rage128 or better.

There's lots of early Radeons you could pick up very cheap, and have been known to provide excellent TV output.

 

[CrispyFried]

ATI 7x00 or so, should be dirt cheap. Most all ATIs have s-video out.

 

[CalvinHobbs]

ya was thinking in that range the ATI 7000 or something whereabout, thanks for the reply guys

 

[Goosemaster]

True HTPCs need FAST CPU's

That might cause a problem.

If it is jsut for DVD's it'll be fine.

 

[CalvinHobbs]

well maybe i shouldn't have said htpc and dvd player instead, couldn't find any better use for this pc of mine, i could have bought a stand-alone dvd player but then i already have this one lying idle, also i can play any format with the pc, well i'm gonna look for the low end ati available in shops

 

[CrispyFried]

I have a multimedia server next to my hdtv, its a celeron 1 ghz (733 overclocked) with 512 megs, an ati 7200 32 meg pci card with s-video out and a sb live 5.1 hooked to a yamaha 5.1 reciever that has the individual inputs for the 5.1 cables from the sb. i play avis though it all the time, no probs. Also tons of mp3s. It sucks most stuff from my game rig via the network as the 250 gig hd in the game machine is my biggest drive and most everything is stored there.

DVDs just go through a dvd player via componant cables though.

 

[CalvinHobbs]

Originally posted by: CrispyFried
I have a multimedia server next to my hdtv, its a celeron 1 ghz (733 overclocked) with 512 megs, an ati 7200 32 meg pci card with s-video out and a sb live 5.1 hooked to a yamaha 5.1 reciever that has the individual inputs for the 5.1 cables from the sb. i play avis though it all the time, no probs. Also tons of mp3s. It sucks most stuff from my game rig via the network as the 250 gig hd in the game machine is my biggest drive and most everything is stored there.

DVDs just go through a dvd player via componant cables though.

what i wanna know is about the quality of the image that the 7200 has on it's tv out, does the avi's look good on your hdtv? if it's good then i'll go for the 7200. i have got an sb5.1 too in the pIII, motherboard is QDI, basically wanna use it to play movies (all formats, avi,asf,divx, dvd etc) also do you get issues like the output from the 7200 doesn't take the whole space of the screen?

 

[CrispyFried]

I cant compare to anything else. I run at 800x600 on the computer side and set the HDTV (52" widescreen) to Zoom mode (its a zoomed 4:3 mode) to watch avi movies. This gives me the proper aspect ratio and almost the full screen in widescreen avi movies is used. Sounds confusing but it works great. The qaulity is better than tape by far, but short of DVD. Depending on the codec, sometimes I can notice banding or pixelated areas but theyre not that bad.

With powerstrip you can do better resolutions but Zoom works great for me.

Its clear enough to read web pages with large fonts but I wouldnt want to for prolonged periods. For normal desktop stuff I just use Full screen on the HDTV and ignore the stretch.

 

[CalvinHobbs]

that sounds great, well i just wanna watch movies with it and nothing else. thanks for the info mate

 

[happy medium]

I have a old Dell pent 3, 600 with a mx420,64 meg video card with tv out that plays movies just fine. OH yea it only has 128 megs of rambus.

And i have an extra mx420 64 meg card lying around ,sell it to you cheap!!