HTPC Graphics Card Advice

[hackenz]

Hi Guys
Well sadly I'm putting my 3 XBMC's out to pasture, well eb*Y any way & I'll be sad to see them go. All other rooms in the house have PC's connected to Plasmas/LCD's to view films/listen to music etc.

I'm building an HTPC for the living room & I'm going to use a Intel Core Duo with 2Mb of Ram In an Antec Micro Fusion case. I'm basically looking for an Graphics card to suit. The system is primarily being built to play MKV files something my XBMC's won't touch.

Native resolution on my Hitachi P50T01UA is 720P, so i'm looking for a card that will support that & happily play MKV files, gaming will be at the same resolution. I could easily spend over £100 on a card that's not really necessary so your opinions are required.

Regards

 

[NiggyG]

You haven't said which software you intend to use with your new HTPC. If you going for the new flavors of XBMC then playback is not limited by the graphics card but is very CPU intesive.

In otherwords most GPU's would be up to the task.

 

[hackenz]

I'm going to be using media portal with either media player 11 or KM player as the default playback software.

Depends which os I plump for using these guides

XP -

 http://www.projecthtpc.co.uk/htpc_software.html

Vista -

http://www.projecthtpc.co.uk/htpc_software08.html

I'm very familiar with XP so that's the obvious option but I'm not ruling out Vista.
Happy to spend a reasonable amount on a card, but it's easy to go overkill& get a card which I,m never really going to fully use.

 

[supersub40]

I'm going to be using media portal with either media player 11 or KM player as the default playback software.

Depends which os I plump for using these guides

XP -

 http://www.projecthtpc.co.uk/htpc_software.html

Vista -

http://www.projecthtpc.co.uk/htpc_software08.html

I'm very familiar with XP so that's the obvious option but I'm not ruling out Vista.
Happy to spend a reasonable amount on a card, but it's easy to go overkill& get a card which I,m never really going to fully use.

my non gaming ATI 2400 passively cooled card goes for about £20 and can hardware decode bluray/hdvd mkvs at 1080p play perfectly
AMD 4600 dual core 939 chipset