UK Users Video Card Advice

[Mark SS]

I'm interested to hear what recent(ish) video cards fellow UK users are using. I'm due upgrades for the HTPC and currently use an Nvidia 7 series card but it appears to be mostly limited to 60hz output.

Looked at the specs for more recent Nvidia cards and they also appear to list 1920x1080 and 720 at 60hz only. Do the ATI cards suit UK broadcasts any better i.e. 50hz?

Debating trying one of the passive cooled Sapphire 5450 cards as they're quite cheap but would prefer to spend a reasonable sum on a newer card incase I resort to gaming again

Kit comprises Pioneer 508xd (720p) TV, Optoma HD80 (1080p) projector and Onkyo 805 amp. Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.

[keefb]

Mark,

1 How much are you intending to spend on this upgrade?
2 Do you keep your HTPC on all the time?

If you are thinking of sending more than £150 look at the HD200 & use your HTPC as the server. I went through the same thought processes as you. I was thoroughly ticked off with Vista offering me endless updates & the HTPC taking an age to boot up & then settle down after variable bouts of disk thrashing. The whole thing was just too flaky.

I have WHS so the tuners & the media store are in there. You obviously have tuners in your HTPC so you've got the basics.

The great thing about the HD200 is that it's about the size of a TV series DVD box, it's silent & it's ready to use 10-15 secs after turning it on. It will handle 24/50/60Hz,works up to full HD resolution & will play a bewildering array of different media files. You can run DVD file structures from your HTPC HDD & Bluray support is in V7 beta. The only downside, which is, in view fairly minor is that it only supports HDMI 1.2 so it won't do Dolby HD audio passthrough or DTS-HD. It down-samples to Dolby 5.1. At the moment this really only affects Bluray DVD playback & I do that through a Bluray player. Like you, I also have a full HD projector connected,in my case through an Onkyo SRS 606.

As you can tell, I think it's the bee's knees.