Originally Posted by SHSPVR
I just love CPU Utilization part is really useless becuase all of today Video card are still mostly base on 3rdparty SW-Decoder which mean you still need fast CPU unlike a ture HW-Decoder which provides a real decoding performance unlike today video card which only do part HW-accelerated decoding not full HW-decoding.
Let say for Example you have Intel P3 800MHz runing 2000Pro or XP with 512MB and you can chosse from GeForce"4" MX4000 or GeForce"7" 7800 becuase you want upgarde your old ATI 3D RAGE PRO 4MB what do you think you see in CPU Utilization from the two card newer card.
I know what you mean.... but to be fair.... newer graphics cards really do a better job at HW DECODING. I noticed a big difference when I upgraded to the new Nvidia 7600... and that's a reasonably priced card now. If you prefer ATI, you'd have to buy an X1600 or above to see any real difference. From what I hear, the X1300 is pretty weak in video decoding. The Nvidia 7600 is great at HD decoding.... better still at regular MPEG-2. Right now I'm watching HD which is fed into my TV on a separate output I'm typing this and working on an illustraion in CorelDraw all at the same time. CPU usage hardly goes over 15%. That's much better than my other computer that has an ATI X850XT.
I liked this bit in that Anandtech review though:
The architecture of the Theater 650 is very similar to the 550, but with a few in changes. The 650 (for NTSC/ATSC countries) includes a Samsung mini-can tuner capable of tuning both analog and digital channels. The "mini-can", from what we understand, is an analog tuner (like the old tin-can tuners that wasted huge amounts of board space) shrunken down to fit in the same area as a silicon tuner. This is a best of both worlds situation where we don't need to worry about the board space of a tin-can, and we shouldn't run into the tuning speed issues we can sometimes see on silicon tuners.
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Unfortunately, the T650 is just as slow as the T 550.... too bad. It's annoyingly slow.
Jonas