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Got a Dell Dimension 9100 boxen just a week ago, used but it works great, got 2K3 x64 screaming along on it. It came with the stock ATI X300 in it, rather crappy card with 128MB on a 64 bit bus, bleh. It's PCI-E, of course.
So here's the dilemma:
I don't game aside from Quake 3 once in awhile, and any video card can play that at decent resolutions nowadays with decent framerates, so my focus is on multimedia, namely decent video playback of HD streams. I have a monitor capable of playing back 1080 content in a window with lots of room to spare (2048x1536 without breaking a sweat) sooo...
I'm looking for recommendations on a card that's capable of getting by with respects to 1080 playback. The machine itself is capable: P4 3 GHz w/HT, soon to be replaced by a Pentium D 925 or 925 dual core; RAM is currently just the original 1GB stock DDR2 533, soon to be replaced by 2GB of Mushkin DDR2; hard drive is a basic 250GB SATA I 16MB drive.
It's quite capable aside from the current X300. The X300 can do 720 stuff easy, that's a non-issue, but I'll be doing some video editing and I require playback of 1080 content without issues, gotta be able to do it with the card and no issues.
Also, I've considered one of the ATI X1xxx series cards because of that cool little utility ATI created to encode to MPEG4/h/x264 faster by using the GPU on the X1xxx series cards - that could come in very handy when doing video encoding at a later time.
So the choices are pretty much narrowed to the ATI X1xxx (X1000) series cards. Question is, which one would do my needs justice, and do it for a low price. I'm not interested in $200+ for another video card anymore, I'm just not going there. My hopeful cap is between $100-150 and I don't mind buying used hardware, just interested in what other people have to say about this based on their own experiences.
As for Nvidia, I'm simply not interested in their hardware, period. It's ATI or even Matrox if Matrox had something that would work for this particular role I'll be filling with the video card. 3D functionality is a distant second - 2D and video playback of HD content is the priority here, so gimme your best tips or opinions or experiences, I'm all ears. Errrmmm... eyes, as it were since I'm reading all this.
Thanks...
So here's the dilemma:
I don't game aside from Quake 3 once in awhile, and any video card can play that at decent resolutions nowadays with decent framerates, so my focus is on multimedia, namely decent video playback of HD streams. I have a monitor capable of playing back 1080 content in a window with lots of room to spare (2048x1536 without breaking a sweat) sooo...
I'm looking for recommendations on a card that's capable of getting by with respects to 1080 playback. The machine itself is capable: P4 3 GHz w/HT, soon to be replaced by a Pentium D 925 or 925 dual core; RAM is currently just the original 1GB stock DDR2 533, soon to be replaced by 2GB of Mushkin DDR2; hard drive is a basic 250GB SATA I 16MB drive.
It's quite capable aside from the current X300. The X300 can do 720 stuff easy, that's a non-issue, but I'll be doing some video editing and I require playback of 1080 content without issues, gotta be able to do it with the card and no issues.
Also, I've considered one of the ATI X1xxx series cards because of that cool little utility ATI created to encode to MPEG4/h/x264 faster by using the GPU on the X1xxx series cards - that could come in very handy when doing video encoding at a later time.
So the choices are pretty much narrowed to the ATI X1xxx (X1000) series cards. Question is, which one would do my needs justice, and do it for a low price. I'm not interested in $200+ for another video card anymore, I'm just not going there. My hopeful cap is between $100-150 and I don't mind buying used hardware, just interested in what other people have to say about this based on their own experiences.
As for Nvidia, I'm simply not interested in their hardware, period. It's ATI or even Matrox if Matrox had something that would work for this particular role I'll be filling with the video card. 3D functionality is a distant second - 2D and video playback of HD content is the priority here, so gimme your best tips or opinions or experiences, I'm all ears. Errrmmm... eyes, as it were since I'm reading all this.
Thanks...
