I've been looking into getting a replacement for my old AGP Radeon x1600. My little one managed to kill it by turning on and off my HTPC. I don't want to spend too much and wanted something silent. The only thing I really found was the GF6200 and some other ATI's. Will the GF6200 be sufficient for DIVX-HD, h.264, and blu-ray playback? I'm limited to an AGP card because my HTPC case only came with an AGP riser card.
no,it won't do for h.264 or VC1 . U MIGHT try ati 2400 pro agp -- it has hardware acceleration for h.264 ( not straigt and forward though, some driver -registry tweaks needed)
thanks for the reply alec76, I was about ready to pull the trigger on a 6200, good thing I didn't. I was looking into the 2400pro but have read there are numerous driver issues, is this the reason for the registry tweaks? Would a x1550 or 7300GT be better suited to my needs? My old x1600 pro did just fine at most everything I threw at it, only a few sync problems here and there. My HTPC consists of: Core2 4500 on a VIA P4M800 based motherboard 2GB DDR-400 onboard audio.
well, ati and driver issues--- it is kinda normal u have to do registry tweaks TO ACTIVATE hardware accel- and there is no guaranty it will work every time u want to play h.264 content( let say ati3850 agp- will work straight out of a box or 2600 pci-e or gf8500-8600 pci-e, no tweaks needed there ) - anyway u cpu is not to bad--- in most cases it will work just fine without hardware accel along whith the gf6200 or 7300 or ANY Graphics Card( only exception blue-ray playback - with the video bitrate 30-40 Mbps-- cpu load whould be around 80-90 % whithout hardware accel and only 4-8 % whithin) 6200 or 1550 or 7300 does not support hardware accel for h.264 btw . there is only ONE h.264 decoder which CAN support hardware accel-- it is CYBERLINK H.264 ( POWER DVD 7.0 DELUXE OR higher)- - coreavc or elecard or ffdshow cant do that-- only cpu support
With all the cards shifting to PCI-e it's hard to hang on to my old AGP motherboard setup. With the the wealth of information that you've provided me, it seems the best thing for me to do is to get myself a PCI-e riser card ($30) and a lower end PCI-e offering from ATI or NVIDIA. (I have an extra motherboard that has a PCI-e slot) Just looking at the prices, it seems that I could get 8400GS for under $30 which has acceleration for H.264, WMV9, VC-1, etc. Both that would satisfy my needs at the same price of a capable AGP card. Guess it just means I have to reinstall my OS.
So I swapped out my motherboard reloaded everything...but am left to decide on which card to get now. I've been reading up on 2 cards in particular: The MSI GeForce 8500GT w/HDMI out and DVI or the ASUS Radeon HD 3450. Which one would you guys go for?
