nvidia 8600GT vs ati 2600Pro AND TV Card suggestions

[alijiwani]

Which is better for SageTV?

I have to build a SageTV box in 2 weeks for a friend and am trying to determine the best value for her money. She is never going to game and as such I am looking at the $100 range on newegg.

Seems the 8600GT and the 2600Pro fall in that range. Anyone have any suggestions on what is better for Sage? She will be using it with a SD via SVHS for now, but in the next year will likely get a nice flatscreen.

Also, she currently has digital+analogue cable, (digital useless of course with her SD), but for future expansion, any particular TV cards I should look at? I was thinking of getting the SageTV Hybrid Media Center In-a-Box or SageTV Dual-Tuner Bundle & Remote.

I currently am looking at a $200 Intel Processor E6750, a single GB of RAM (1 stick) and a 500GB HD. Have yet to pick a MB, but aiming for the $150 or less range.

Suggestions? Comments?

[toricred]

Which OS?

[alijiwani]

XP Pro

[toricred]

I'm using a 8500GT on XP Home and it is working great. I'm using the internationalized beta driver that added support for hardware accelerated h.264.

[alijiwani]

is that one of the passively cooled cards? I want to avoid those as I have had too many friends had those commit suicide and once I turn this system over to her (she's in another city), there wont be anyone to maintain it very often.

[toricred]

Mine is passively cooled, but most of the 8500GT's aren't.

[alijiwani]

cool. I was doing some more reading and thinking since she will never game, the 8600 or the 2600 may be overkill. Will the 8500 assist with HD decoding in the future?

[toricred]

Absolutely. It is currently accelerating my mpeg2, h.264, and mp4 files.

[alijiwani]

awesome, one problem solved.

now just have to figure out the best card's to buy her for TV capture.

Know if the Sage bundled HVR-1600 does QAM or are they selling us the older model?

[infocus13]

Toricred - here's some feedback based on my current experiences w/Sage & the hardware you mentioned:

* 2600pro - currently running that on my sage box along with an amd x2 4200+, to a CRT 1080i TV via DVI. The card works great with the cyberlink codecs (for all video types incl. HD/h264). Only had one file so far that sage wouldnt play (not sure if it was the card though) - a jarhead 1080p ".mov" trailer. I would get lots of stutter in sage, however the same file played in powerdvd was 100% fine, so could be a sage/2600pro incompatibility. Note this card plays my other HD .mov trailers in sage without any issues either.

BUT - this card played all my other HD files including the same jarhead 1080p trailer, but in "WMV" format beautifully - no stutter or problems whatsover, the GPU is using to offload the cpu and all is good. The jarhead trailer looked stunning in WMV too (colours, sharpness, saturation) much better than the stuttery ".mov" version.

I also believe that the 2600pro offers additional decode abilities that the 8500gt doesnt (not sure what they are, but google the two cards & you'll find out). Basically the 2600pro+powerdvd 7.3 ultra is the best combo for decoding all currently available HD content (better than the nvidia equivalent cards). If anyone wants to correct me on this, feel free.

* TV card - I have the Nova-T 500 MCE dual tuner and it works beautifully in sage. channel change around 3-4 seconds, no stuttuer on OTA dvb-t (SD and HD). Used to have a dvico dual digital 4 and it was absolute crap - stutter, slow channel change speeds, etc, etc.

Hope this helps.

[toricred]

I didn't say anything bad about ATI, I was just mentioning that my 8500GT works great for me with the purevideo codecs. I've also tried PDVD 7 Deluxe, but it was worse.

I admit to a personal prejudice towards Nvidia based on my experience trying to get ATI to work in linux (talk about a nightmare) and finding Nvidia to work perfectly in the same HW/SW environment. I'm not sure what the 2600pro has that I don't, but at this point I don't need it. Maybe in the future I will. I do know that the 2600pro has h.264 acceleration on XP right now and Nvidia was slow to update their drivers to allow that with the 8xxx cards, but the driver I'm using now definitely allows it.

[GTwannabe]

You're not missing anything with the 8500GT. Sure, the Radeon 2400/2600 does bitstream decoding for MPEG-HD and VC-1, but those are trivial tasks for any semi-modern CPU to handle, so nVidia didn't do it in hardware. The remainder of the decoding process is handled by the GPU.

[reggie14]

I've been having some problems with HD playback in Vista with a 6600GT. I've been thinking about getting a new video card anyway to help with performance in HL2.

It looks like you can get 8600GT and 2600XT cards for about $100. Does anyone have experience with either of them under Vista?

[Paul H]

JMTCW:

I use a 12" touchscreen for my control, no remote. I have a Nivida 7300 card setup as dual displays, the touchscreen is primary and my 50" TV is on secondary (dualview). I also use "mirror fullscreen to secondary". This allows me to use the primary for other things, like lighting control or DVD setup. BUT, as per Nividia: "This option is NOT available on 8000 and above cards". This means that my TV will NOT SHOW ONLY fullscreen content! To use these cards I'd have to CLONE the outputs, meaning EVERYTHING would be displayed on the TV. I think that is messy and unacceptable.
BTW: Using the 7300 I only occasionally have studdering, Mostly on HDTV with lots of action.
I would like to use a better card, if someone knows of one that will fit my requirements please let me know.

As I said JMTCW

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by alijiwani

I currently am looking at a $200 Intel Processor E6750, a single GB of RAM (1 stick) and a 500GB HD. Have yet to pick a MB, but aiming for the $150 or less range.

Suggestions? Comments?

I'd suggest 2 sticks of RAM, all of the current CPUs use dual channel memory to achieve synchronous FSB speeds. If you run with one stick you'll be bottlenecking the processor. Probably not major but you'll get better performance out of 2x512 if you want a GB than 1 1GB chip. I'd look at a 2x1GB kit, it can be had for as little as $40.

I'd look for a card that supports HDCP. It's good future proofing if she decides she wants to use the system for HD movie playback down the road.