Minimum gfx card reqs

slyborg

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Hi,

Building my H(T|C)PC is a few months off but doing some initial investigation.

I'll need it to take the signal from my Sky+ and X-Box so that dscaler can do it's magic and output to my Panny 5 series 42" (would a straight VGA cable suffice and give the best quality?). I have no need for video capture as such as my Sky+ box does all I need in that dept. So my question is what sort of card/cards do I need to take those 2 sources, obviously no DVD as I'll be using the inbuilt DVD player. It might also be useful if it had a secondary output I could connect to my VCR for those rare occasions I need to record something for a friend.

Gonna have a quick look into Audio card reqs but would I be correct in assuming that you get raw data from the SPDIF (sp?) so any audio card will do I hear a lot of talk about the Revo? Oh and I assume if using the SPDIF then that will work with 7.1, ES,EX etc. audio?

Thanks in advance

Si
 
Hi there Si,

You'll need 2 cards to achieve what you want, a capture card, to take the signal from your Xbox and Sky+ box, and a graphics card to output the VGA signal to your Plasma.

Current king of the crop for capture is the £30 TV-100 card which you can buy from PC world, people have noted extremely little difference between this card and the holo3D which costs well over 10x more, whilst using S-Video in. Using composite, the differences are much more visible, but you really should be using S-Video in.

Graphics card wise, i believe the current choice is the Radeon 9600. It's available from some manufacturers as fanless, is fully DX9/VMR9 compliant, and has enough grunt also if not on the cutting edge of PC gaming is your thing. If you're a big gamer, you should go for the 9800 all the way.

If you're only looking to pass S/PDIF to your home cinema reciever, i find the onboard digital out on my Nforce motherboard works very well, but then i only have a middle range amp, Denon 3802. People have said that they've heard quite a bit of difference between the digital out on the Revo and normal onboard sound, but at the moment, i'd rather spend the money on some better cables for my projector. In my situation this will reap much more benefits that the upgrade of soundcard will. The big benefit of the Revo is that its analogue outs are of very high quality, surpassing that of much middle range gear, so that's something to think about if you've not considered it before. I've never owned one, so i can't really say much about it however.
 
As Seany says, the 9600 is about the best going at the mo - the non pro version is fanless, and is about £90 from ebuyer.com.

You can get good results from any Radeon - I'm currently using an old Radeon VE with excellent DVD playback using PowerDVD XP. I've ordered the 9600 and will compare it next week.

Gary.
 
Hi Slyborg,

Check out this thread for a couple of components from my HCPC that I dismantled recently (went back to DVD standalone player - WAF :rolleyes: ). The gfx card is a stunner if you don't want to play games (and also fanless) and the TV card has never been out its box.

LMK

Joust
 

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