Video Card for HTPC

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elkano

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#30119 29-Jan-2009 12:06

Hi Guys,

after an inital good run with my onboard radeon 3200 I find I am getting the stuttering/freezing issues associated with freeview HD playback, so I'm looking for a video card to ease my pain

I was looking at the 4350 or 4550 from ATI which seem to do all the decoding I need, plus output 7.1 lpcm over HDMI.
I'm hoping someone can give me a definitive answer about whether these cards also get the stutter or if there are good Nvidia alternatives.

ANy help would be appreciated!

Regs

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Snowflake

#192748 29-Jan-2009 17:02

if you search the forums you'll see that the nvidia 8500 (or newer) cards are typically giving people the least amount of trouble. some problems have been encountered using ati and intel chipsets and I cant remember if all have been resolved yet or not

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Ragnor

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#192757 29-Jan-2009 17:41

What are you using to recieve the sound? If you want audio (eg: from a blue ray disc/drive) in TrueHD or DTS-MA I think you will have to get a 4530. However if you just want the audio as AC3 or DTS you can use spdif out straight from your audio card/onboard audio.

The Nvidia 9400 GT 512mb (which are ~$90-100) has an spdif input on the card to pass through the audio so it comes out over HDMI and might be an option for you.

So it kind of depends on what reciever you are using for the audio.

Nety

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#192767 29-Jan-2009 19:07

Ragnor: What are you using to recieve the sound? If you want audio (eg: from a blue ray disc/drive) in TrueHD or DTS-MA I think you will have to get a 4530.

Why do you think the 4530 would give you TrueHD or DTS-MA? From what I ccan find it is just a video card.. a budget one at that. The only way I know of currently to get either of those formats from a PC is with a Asus Xonar HDAV Soundcard for similar.
Love to be proved wrong though

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#192777 29-Jan-2009 19:47

@Nety - what about a Motherboard such as this:

http://www.gigabyte.co.nz/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=2877&ProductName=GA-EG45M-DS2H

Website says:

Blu-ray Full Rate Audio Support
The ALC889A enables high quality Full Rate Lossless Audio for content protected media and support Blu-ray formats for an exhilarating home theater entertainment experience.

Is that likely to be uncompressed TrueHD/DTS-MA??

Nety

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#192782 29-Jan-2009 20:23

Only internally... had a bit more of a look into this yesterday as my own motherboard in my main rig claims the same thing.

The difference is that cards like this will do the decoding of the HD signal internally and output it via the analogue outputs.

If you want a soundcard that will send the HD sound to a AV receiver via HDMI you are limited to the Xonar at this stage (may be one or two other sound cards that can do this but the Xonar is the only one I have heard of).

So is a soundcard that does the decoding itself and outputs this via analogue a bad thing? Well no it is not. The signal has to be converted from digital to analogue with a DAC at some point anyway so what is the down side to the onboard soundcard doing it?
Well in short Realtek who produce basically all onboard soundcards (and any other onboard soundcards that you may find) are built for cost. They use very cheap and nasty DAC's in fact everything about them is cheap and nasty.
The end result is that you will likely not be getting better sound from one of the onboard HD soundcards then you would from a good quality add in soundcard that is being feed a down converted signal by the blu ray software.
Something like the the Xonar can also output via analogue but because it has high quality DAC's you can bet it would sound in a whole different class. On top of that if you have a good AV receiver then you can send it the uncompressed signal and let the receivers DAC's do the converting.

Nety

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#192814 29-Jan-2009 22:24

Nety:
Ragnor: What are you using to recieve the sound? If you want audio (eg: from a blue ray disc/drive) in TrueHD or DTS-MA I think you will have to get a 4530.

Why do you think the 4530 would give you TrueHD or DTS-MA? From what I ccan find it is just a video card.. a budget one at that. The only way I know of currently to get either of those formats from a PC is with a Asus Xonar HDAV Soundcard for similar.
Love to be proved wrong though

OK proved wrong.. cool..ish. Still like the Xonar way better but at least it is another option.

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=84&TopicId=30027

Ragnor

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#192843 30-Jan-2009 02:21

Well you are sort of right, as the Anandtech links in the other thread show the ATI cards use a realtek codec to software decode the DTS-MA and TrueHD and send full quality LPCM via DVI to HDMI.

So it's video card ($80-100) + sound card (~$120) vs video card ($80-100) basically.

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Nety

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#192878 30-Jan-2009 10:21

ewww I thought it was using the onboard realtek hardware to decode. If it uses software then that is not so good. It is annoying just how hard it is to find out how things like this work. Seems to be like trying to get a straight answer out of a politician

europa

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Wannabe Geek

#192919 30-Jan-2009 13:40

I have heard the Asus EN9400GT Silent is the one to use, I will be using one too.

elkano

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Master Geek

#192942 30-Jan-2009 15:32

Bit of a pity, the 4550 seems to have the edge on the 9400GT in most reviews and it outputs 7.1 LPCM too. If only ATI would work out the driver (assuming this is the problem) issues with NZ freeview decoding I'd buy it right away.
Does anyone know if there is any word from ATI in fixing these issues?