TV-out card shopping: suggestions needed :)

[jkwarras]

Hi folks,

I'm looking for a TV-out card for my PC. Purpouse? Watch DivX and DVD on my TV. I'm going to buy a 16:9 TV so i'm looking for a cheap card to enjoy it even more :)

What do i want? Cheap card with good image quality (and text/subtitles displayed fairly) and less posible letterbox and/or black bars/borders.

I'm running on a Pentium III 800Mhz and 320 Ram (not a new machine, right?). I'm living in Europe (Belgium), and so some cards aren't sold here.

I've seen that ATI Radeon cards with 64MB can do the trick and get best reviews, and are really cheap. Any of you can point me to some cards? Any suggestions from the tv-out cards you're using?

Thanks a lot.

Regards.

[Soulhunter]

Here... (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69081) ;)

Bye

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by Soulhunter
Here... (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69081) ;)

Bye

Thanks for the link. OK, after browsing a lot i've come to the conclusion (so maybe i have all wrong) that this cards can do what i want:

- ATI Radeon 7000 VE 32 MB - 31€
- ATI Radeon 7000 VE 64 MB - 39€
- GeforceMX440 64MB AGP - 42€

And then we have the ATI RAdeon 9000 (and up series) with 128MB that i can find around 60€ (and up).

OK. I¡m a little lost with the meaning of the XX MB for every card. i supposed that more memory, faster performance. Right now i have a NVIDIA 32MB TNT2 and everything works fine. I don't play games. So i don't know if I really need buying something around 64MB or more. I think to be safe that this is the option to go (64MB Radeon), as is cheap, but maybe i don't need it. I just want to see DivX/DVD on my TV.

Regards.

[NaN]

I think if you want the best available tv-out, get a matrox g400 or a g400 max second hand. Don't touch the g450 since it's a degraded version of the g400.

Why? Because the G400 uses an external Marvel-chip (has even its own heatsink!), for more infos, you may look here: http://forums.matroxusers.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46282

It's basically a thread AGAINST the g400, but you will see immediatly why I posted it here.

Another nice and unique option is the bios setting to run with only the TV attached...

To your other question: no. More memory will not lead to higher performance, since you're watching tv and don't need lots of memory for anti-aliasing. You can just double buffer the frames (but that's with 32MB (or 16?) possible too.)

Cheers!

[communist]

Got the Radeon VE with 32mb ram for 25€ inc. shipping (brand new card).
It gets the job done perfectly iMO. And it has no noisy fan :)

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by communist
Got the Radeon VE with 32mb ram for 25€ inc. shipping (brand new card).
It gets the job done perfectly iMO. And it has no noisy fan :)

Thanks a lot for all your replies. This has been very helpfull. I will go for a cheap Radeon 32 MB :)

Regards.