New Video Card ? (1 Viewer)

[LewB]

I just added a Dell 17" LCD monitor to my Dimension 8250. The new monitor is great and has both VGA and DVI inputs. My current video card only supports VGA.
I'm not a gamer and don't use the PC to do any serious DVD viewing. Is it worth the price for me to replace the video card with one that supports DVI? Prices look like anywhere from $60 to $400 (maybe more).

 

[AaronMg]

Check out the Radeon 9xxx series. If you want the best of the best, look into the 9800 pro. If you want above average, check out the 9700 pro, and if you dont want to spend all that much money, you could always go with the 9500 pro.

 

[JamesHl]

He said he's not a gamer. Why get something like that?

You can get a radeon 7000 with dvi out for $40. As to it being worth it, I couldn't say. I've switched one monitor from vga to dvi and it was a vast improvement, but it was a really horribly vga cable that was letting in a lot of interference. I would also say that I thought it looks smoother, but just one comparison in an extreme situation is difficult to base a judgement on.

 

[Rick Blaine]

I'm looking into a new Video Card as well, specifically for DVD Playback. Are there any cards that do the MPEG decompression in the Video card rather than the CPU.

Are there any good seperate Analog/Digital I/O cards. I have heard it is more efficient to use a seperate card or external device for Video I/O to cameras, recorders, etc?

Thanks for your opinions.

Rick B.

 

[Ken Chan]

The current Radeons and GeForces have MPEG support.

As for video I/O, you should use FireWire, which is the current (digital) standard. If you have some analog stuff, you can get an external converter like the Canopus ADVC-100.

//Ken

 

[Rick Blaine]

Thanks Ken

I was under the impression that a PCI card with I/O would be more efficient than firewire.

Rick

 

[Ken Chan]

Not sure what you mean by "efficient"; CPU utilization? If you use FireWire, the video is already compressed. The ADVC-100 has a hardware DV encoder, so the processing is off-loaded to the box. So capturing DV over FireWire gives you good quality with a low datarate, much lower than uncompressed video, with low CPU overhead, which means you are less likely to drop frames. Plus, all the editing programs out there are now geared toward capturing DV over FireWire.

If the motherboard doesn't have FireWire support, you'd get it by adding a FireWire PCI card for about $20.

//Ken

 

[JasonRuiz]

Actually the new Geforces DON'T do DVD playback on the card, the only Geforces that di it are the MX cards. THe MX cards give up the onboard vertex shaders etc. but they have onboard MPEGII decoders w/ iDCT, the "full fledged" Geforce4 cards offloasd these duties to the CPU.