HDCP compliant AGP video cards and custom resolution

[emgee]

I have a most of an old PC lying around, and I'm about to acquire an HD telly. So, all I need is an HDCP compliant video card, and a Blu-ray drive, and I have the makings of a home theatre PC...

Thing is, being oldish bits, the board is AGP. OCUK sells the Asus ATI Radeon HD 3650 (AGP), which it says is HDCP compliant. So far so good, but I read about all sorts of problems as you can't get 1366x768 resolution (the native resuolution of the TV screen) on ATI GPUs as there is no custom resolution setting.

a) Is it really practicable to use Powerstrip to force the custom resolution on an ATI card, so as to get exact pixel matching?

b) Does editing inf files to add new custom resolutions work for these cards without breaking something?

c) Are there any AGP NVIDIA cards that are HDCP compliant?

Otherwise I may have to shell out for more bits to get a later PCI-E Nvidia card that has custom resolutions in its settings system (is this true, say for a 9400GT?)

 

[Ste]

What TV is it?

Most will recognise 1360x768 (A PC standard res) and just ignore 3 pixels each side of the image to retain perfect 1:1 mapping

From what I remember you will have problems getting 1366 even with a nvidia card - it's not divisible by 8 or something...

 

[cokecan]

I have used powerstrip before to force a 1280x720 res at 50hz before on my old projector, it worked great and simply ran in the background without me having to alter any settings once it had been set up so could be practical once set up

but as Ste said, you may be better off just setting 1360x768 as your res, your not going to miss 3 pixels each side of the image

 

[3dcandy]

Use 1360x768
you don't even notice the 3 pixels as said above. ATI's use this and my Samsung tv accepts it fine with zero problems.

 

[rubberduck]

1366x768 is quite easy to setup using powerstrip. I've done it on an old ATI card.

 

[emgee]

Thanks folks. Interesting advice.

Turns out it's now going to be a Panasonic THPZ80B, so can use 1360x768 (or 1366 if I master Powerstrip) for 1080i standard, or full HD - according to how much I spend next door on components.

 

[thesubstitute]

I'm more concerned about when you say "Old PC Bits" how old the bits are

My old PC bits struggled with HD with said graphics card. I was on an overclocked Athlon 64 3000 with 1Gb RAM. Basically I had to close all other application and background stuff and sometimes still struggled with 720p pictures. So I upgraded everything else AND the gfx card again