AGP GFX Card

[Nick Smith]

i need an AGP card for my new (nearly complete) media center PC.

At the moment my specs are:

Intel Celeron 2ghz
478 socket mobo
512mb DDR RAM (should be enough?)

and all i really need to finish it is a graphics card.

As my CPUs...well, a bit old. I'm not sure what card to go for.

as i dont want to spend around £50 on an ATI x800 or similar, then find out that the CPU bottlenecking and im getting no way near enough performance out of the card that i should have.

any suggestions as to what card to go for?

Cheers

Nick

[redlight]

Something like this would be fine for a media centre
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/90870

[Nick Smith]

cheers, will it be able to run a 22" widescreen ok?

[Biscuit]

If you will be using it for recording any TV programs i would maybe try and get a bit more ram

[redlight]

cheers, will it be able to run a 22" widescreen ok?

It will be fine does not have to be that flavour and I hate to say it but Nvidias software is much better in that department than ATI. Biscuits right another 512mb of ram would be good.

[this_is_gav]

512mb would be OK for only recording. Agreed, ideally 1gb would be good, but it's not critical.

A word of caution if you're using Vista - the nV drivers are, frankly, awful in MCE at high res on the low end cards - stutters all over the place on mine. XP MCE2005 is fine with the same setup though.

Personally I've found the ATi drivers to be infinitely better than the nV ones in the past year to so, but I'm not set on starting a debate on the matter.

[Nick Smith]

im not using windows at all for this.

Im going for Linux + Myth TV

[aidanjt]

If you're going to be using mythtv, you'll want to get a hold of a radeon 7000 series card if you can, it has a fully open and functional driver. Or a radeon 9000/9200 based card if you're using a bleeding edge distro, the r300 driver works very well for those cards.

[Nick Smith]

If you're going to be using mythtv, you'll want to get a hold of a radeon 7000 series card if you can, it has a fully open and functional driver. Or a radeon 9000/9200 based card if you're using a bleeding edge distro, the r300 driver works very well for those cards.

i think i got that

cheers,

[hsncool]

if your gonna be using tv cards for capture and timeshifting and stuff, i wouldnt use a celeron. also, if you are using a celeron, u'll deffinatly need more ram to bring its performance level up higher

[aidanjt]

A 2Ghz Celly will do the job fine for MythTV, it should be able to do an MPEG-4 encode and decode job simultaneously (Live TV recording), and 512MB is twice as much as he needs. Read the docs before posting.

The only thing Nick should be make sure he's covered for is the TV card, some of them can be a right bitch to get working with Linux and Myth, some wont at all.

[Nick Smith]

The only thing Nick should be make sure he's covered for is the TV card, some of them can be a right bitch to get working with Linux and Myth, some wont at all.

might have to ask someone who knows about that sort of stuff before i buy one then

[iamwhoiam]

My 6800GT maybe redundant soon... have you considered nvidia?

I don't think you need the power of a 6800 though for media centers

[Nick Smith]

i may have it off you if/when you decide to sell, aslong as it is AGP

[iamwhoiam]

Oh yeah, it's definitely AGP... nForce2ultra =]
When are you planning on finalising your system?

[Nick Smith]

whenever i have the cash tbh, i have most of the parts now, just missing a hard drive and a good enough card for the job.