HTPC card help

[otispunkmeyer]

Hey guys, been out the loop for ages and need some advice

my parents just ridded their old computer onto me this weekend as they have no use for it anymore. its actually the remnants of my gaming machine from a few years back.

anyway, my plans are to try make it into some kind of HTPC/Backup box.

im gonna shoe horn some large disk drives in there to sort the back up stuff out.... the next bit is getting it to be a media style box.

ill need a card with HDMI out (though this isnt absolutely essential) so i can have it hooked right to the telly and pass sound.

i want it to play full on 1080p HD mkv files (H.264 and X.264 etc) and be able to use the lovely bells and whistles the new media player classic has.

heres the specs of the machine as it stands.

CPU: Athlon 64 3200+ running at 2.5Ghz
RAM: 1Gig DDR400
Mobo: MSI K8N SLI Platinum
Sound: On board Creative Audigy .... though i have an actual Audigy card in a PCI slot too. the on board provides SPDIF out (hence HDMI not being absolutely essential)
HDD: 120Gig Spinpoint
PSU: 400W Seasonic S12
GPU: ATi Radeon X800GTO 512mb

will a 9400GT or similar be suitable? i heard i should go for a AMD/ATi 4xxx series because they can decode VC1 as well and pass audio via HDMI.

with a suitable GPU, will that rig even play HD content?

 

[Lonyo]

HD5450 or HD5570.
Should be able to do HD content. Also the lowest power discrete card I think, and it has HDMI and should do audio over HDMI as well.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3734&p=4

And make sure you read this too: http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=669

With that said, there is one catch: the 5450 doesn’t have enough compute power to do any further post-processing on 1080i video besides Vector Adaptive deinterlacing. Just doing the decoding and that deinterlacing requires everything the 5450 can squeeze out, which means there’s nothing left for edge enhancement, de-noise, dynamic contrast, etc. So while the 5450 is a very capable HTPC card (more so than we first thought), it is not the perfect HTPC card like the 5570. If you need every last bell & whistle, the 5450 isn’t quite up to the task. But with Vector Adaptive deinterlacing working, it’s a reasonable expectation that the 5450 offers enough for most people – compared to Vector Adaptive deinterlacing, it’s in our own experience that the other post-processing features go unused most of the time.

So the 5450 is still the almost-perfect HTPC card, but it’s actually quite close. Unless you need more than Vector Adaptive deinterlacing, the 5450 would be as good of a fit as the 5570. To that end it’s the cheapest of the 5000-series, and it’s passively cooled, which certainly has its advantages.

Doesn't seem like there are many reasonably priced HD5570's around.
The 5450 goes for around £30~£35, and the 5570 is around £65~£70, but so is the 5670, so if you want more than the minimum, might as well get a 5670 because it'll do a bit better you if you ever want light gaming, and isn't really any more than the 5570 in terms of price.
But the 5450 is the cheap option, being half the price.
Or the HD4650 is £35~£40 for a cheap DDR2 one, which might be a better choice.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

ahh cool, cheers for that

so i should be ok with the rest of the system? i know its pretty out of date....Athlon 64's are long from being top dogs now and its not even a dual core! but if they can get an Atom and a 9400 to do the job then i was thinking it should be fine (though i know that particular 9400 has extra stuff to help the atom along)

 

[HGC]

I second the idea of going with the Radeon 5000 series. I had a 4670 hooked up to my 1080p TV, recently upgraded to 5750 for other reasons. I didn't expect an improvement in TV image quality, but there is one, very noticeable, too. The 4670 looked great, 5750, gorgeous.

The card is pretty quiet, and low power, too.

 

[mikek753]

I've been looking for good HTPC card for some time too
and with not open API for x.264 h/w support (DXVA) by ATI - not much you can get from ATI cards to play MKV and etc. none standard video.
you may search for my posts to see what I meant in details.
so far only with CUDA / NV cards 9xxx and up you have full video h/w acceleration support without much limit for x.264 and you have ether free mplayer for linux and windows or mpc-hc for windows that uses CUDA and you don't have to pay any extra for this.

if you just about play not modified b-ray disks than for ATI you have to use PowerDVD or other none free s/w.

I've been waiting that newer ATI 5xxx cards will come with open API for this matter, but so far ATI doesn't care for this matter.

The min card would be gt 220 then faster gt 240 that will even play AvP - both dx10.1 - not dx11 as ati 5xxx
where for htpc even dx9 good enough.

 

[Tiktaalik]

I use a 9400gt in my Mythtv htpc setup and it works fine. What htpc software/os will you be using? If it's linux based like Mythbuntu you want to avoid ATI and go nVidia, simply because the drivers are so much better for nVidia on linux.