Which card is better for an HTPC??

I am thinking of building an HTPC using my old D805 and a gig of DDR2 which are lying around doing nothing at the moment. The motherboard I have also has X300 series integrated graphics - is this any good for media purposes??

I was thinking of buying a cheap graphics card off Ebay if it would improve media playback and encoding.

After looking at what was available for under 20 quid I was wondering if a 7300LE turbocache or a 6200 non TC would be better??

Any other cheap cards which may do the trick?

The only game which maybe played on it would be UT2004 sometimes.

As for the media playback, any of them will be fine. Unless you are going HiDef that is.

Graphics card will not help media encoding quality or speed.

onboard should be fine for everything apart from playing games

main thing is that you want it to be silent or be able to control the fans speeds on the card

a lot of the cheaper cards do not have fan control

if you do need a card then a cheap x800 or x1600 from a decent manuf is can be had for £35 off the bay

if you want 1080i/p you're going to want an 8500GT. Makes a massive difference on CPU load and won't kill the machine.

I'm running a P4 3Ghz with 2GB, 8500GT with Vista Home Prem on my HTPC and it runs like a dream. With the previous 6600GT loads of frame dropping and max CPU utilisation. If you are able to test, worth a try. If you're running XP MCE, then I don't know for sure, but Vista performed WAY better on the same hardware (6600GT included).

CPU load with XP MCE running 720p would be about 85-90%. Vista running 1080p about 40% utilisation. Massive difference, and I'm guessing mainly due to the HD capabilities on the 8500.