Which video card for a HTPC?

[DyslexicHobo]

I want to build a media PC to stream movies from my main PC. I'm planning on having just an old Athlon XP and 2-4gb of ram. I'm guessing that my video card will be the most important part of an HD media PC, correct? I want the cheapest thing I can find to suit my needs. It will have to be an AGP card. Will a Radeon 9800 be good enough?

Thanks

Edit: After doing some light browsing, it seems my previous assumptions were way off. I guess this will not be able to handle HD movies very well. I assume this will be good for anything DVD-quality or lower, though. Am I correct about this?

 

[Andrew1990]

I would go for an inexpensive Radeon HD2400 AGP card. Should be able to play HD fine.

 

[mindless1]

AFAIK, your video card will have little to no impact at all except what output port you need. mkv is not a supported, accelerated decoding codec. There may be elaborate hacks that can be done if it is encoded a certain way, they are beyond my ability but surfing around doom9's forum for awhile might help clarify that.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthr...kv+acceleration&page=6

You'd simply need something with the output your monitor or TV supports, capable of the target output resolution. Decompressing mkv 720p with a soft-codec is beyond the ability of an Athlon XP.

DVDs, with any ATI or nVidia card made in about the last 8 years, will play back fine with a mere Pentium III ~ 500MHz CPU. Depending on the Athlon XP's speed, it might actually be capable of decoding MPEG2 720p. I doubt it could do MPEG4/2 720p (Divx, XVid, etc) but it would be close, most median or faster Athlon XP's could do 640x480 MPEG4/2, and be just a little too slow at 640x480 MPEG4/10 H.264.

Instead of buying a video card, a low cost solution would be an all-integrated motherboard with ATI 780G chipset and a low-end Athlon X2 CPU. Overclocking it a modest amount would be even better. About $110 in total give or take with sales, rebates, etc. Add 1GB or more memory, for this use the quantity won't matter much but going with two modules for dual channel will give a minor video performance boost.

 

[alcoholbob]

You can force hardware decoding for MKV files with an nvidia card. It *will* accelerate x264 but CPU utilization hasn't changed. Some people argue hardware acceleration has less macro-blocking than CPU acceleration.

The problem with trying to run hardware acceleration on mkv files (with an nvidia card) is that while x264 files will get accelerated, it can't properly accelerate h264 without massive stuttering. So its pretty much a crapshoot and I wouldn't recommend it.

 

[DyslexicHobo]

Originally posted by: Astrallite
You can force hardware decoding for MKV files with an nvidia card. It *will* accelerate x264 but CPU utilization hasn't changed. Some people argue hardware acceleration has less macro-blocking than CPU acceleration.

The problem with trying to run hardware acceleration on mkv files (with an nvidia card) is that while x264 files will get accelerated, it can't properly accelerate h264 without massive stuttering. So its pretty much a crapshoot and I wouldn't recommend it.

Woah. Way over my head.

But from what I gathered: I'd be better off getting a better CPU than a better video card.

I have a motherboard, Athlon XP 3500, 1gb RAM, a spare HDD, a gigabit NIC card, and a DVD drive. I'm probably going to scavenge for a free case. All that's left to purchase is a PSU (which I will likely be able to get from a friend for super cheap) and a video card.



To mindless:

Thanks a lot for the info. I guess I just won't be able to stream HD movies. I'm fine with that as most of my videos are DVD rips.

 

[Hacp]

Maybe you can just transcode all your mkv files into mp4 ones?

 

[vj8usa]

Originally posted by: mindless1
AFAIK, your video card will have little to no impact at all except what output port you need. mkv is not a supported, accelerated decoding codec.

MKV isn't a codec at all. It's just a container file, and can contain various codecs. Modern cards can offload x264/h.264 decoding, though - I use MPC-HC, and it drops my CPU usage by a massive amount compared to when I'm not using GPU acceleration.