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Sharpest S-Vid TV-out, need a recommendation...

K

kilmanjaro

Senior member
Looking to see where the tv out quality is between Nvidia and ATI lineups. At one time ATI had noticably sharper tv output than Nvidia. Is this still the case? I'm looking for a relatively inexpensive (less than $70) card for a HTPC that will see light gaming in low res (SDTV) but possibility of upgrade to an HDTV w/in a year or so. At the moment I'm considering a 9600, but I'm open to suggestions.

Edit: I'm even considering the Volari V3 if anyone has any first hand experience with their output.
 
I ended up going with a RADEON 9600 myself in my HTPC, because:

a) ATI has always seemed to have good S-Video output quality. NVIDIA seems to be OK now, but has been flaky in the past (and it can apparently vary considerably based on which manufacturer you buy).

b) The RADEON 9600 supports HD component video output via ATI's optional adapter. Many lower-end NVIDIA cards do not.

c) Some NVIDIA cards have had issues with DVI output and HDTVs (see numerous threads at www.avsforum.com). Apparently they don't really meet DVI specs all that well, at least on the lower-end cards.

d) The RADEON 9600 is fanless. The comparable NVIDIA cards (FX5500, 6600) are not.

On the other hand, an NVIDIA 6200 or 6600 would, in theory, give you their hardware decode/encode video processor, FWIW. Currently it only does decode -- although I'm not sure it does anything at all unless you use their codecs. If you want to play around with things like DScaler, it probably won't do you much good.

I have no clue about Volari's products, sorry.
 
I'm basically just looking for a recommendation. From what I've read, I'm very much biased towards an ATI card because of TV out quality. For gaming, the max res I'll be running games on will be 1024x768 simply because it's on a TV. Eventually when I replace my main pc, my current 9700np will probably move to my HTPC so this is more of a stop gap in the mean time (probably a year or so). With this in mind, I'm really considering a 128 bit 9550 for around $69.00. Does anyone have any other suggestions or links to an article comparing quality of S-vid out?

Thanks!
 
Sounds like you and I are in the same boat. I've pretty much settled on the 9550SE, but I'm unsure about the SE part of the card. AFAIK, the SE just means it has half the effective memory bandwidth (64-bit instead of 128) so the card should just perform slower in games, which is not a problem. I've not seen documentation proving that the tv-out on the SE cards are inferior, nor that non-ATI built cards have inferior tv-out.
 
Originally posted by: beatle
Sounds like you and I are in the same boat. I've pretty much settled on the 9550SE, but I'm unsure about the SE part of the card. AFAIK, the SE just means it has half the effective memory bandwidth (64-bit instead of 128) so the card should just perform slower in games, which is not a problem. I've not seen documentation proving that the tv-out on the SE cards are inferior, nor that non-ATI built cards have inferior tv-out.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I went ahead and ordered a 9550 (128 bit) from newegg for $70. We'll see how it works out. It seemed like the best compromise between price and speed and it should play most games well at tv resolutions.
 
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