• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

New Graphics Card for HD Movies and CAD Solidworks

Associate
Joined
10 Feb 2006
Posts
2
Hi Everybody Newbie in need of some advice

I currently have a HP Pavilion 700 PC
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.67GHz
512MB of RAM
and a Nvidia GeForce MX 440
which doesn't have a DVI output.

I do gaming but mostly CAD and Solidworks use.

I would like a new card to have a DVI Output to make best use of
my Samsung 172T Digital Monitor.

Also I would like a card suitable to process High Definition content
direct to my LG 32" HD LCD.

The thing is dont want to spend much, just a suitable upgrade from existing
I would appreciate anybody's help.

p.s.(while on the subject can anybody recommend
places to download HD material).
 
Associate
Joined
23 May 2005
Posts
812
Location
Hove
It depends on a number of things, i guess:

1) How much do you want to spend? £100?
2) Is your "HD" LCD not actually HD, but only capable of outputting 1366x768?

I would recommend nvidia because they have better opengl support and a lot of 3D CAD programmes actually use opengl rather than direct3d. However, at the moment ati have better hardware acceleration for HD content, whether that be h.264 or HD-WMV. Nvidia are promising hardware acceleration for h.264 soon, in their next line of drivers.

Apple have pretty decent h.264 trailers and microsoft have good wmv-hd trailers too. Both require a bit of cpu power, especially the 1080 h.264 trailers.
 
Last edited:
Associate
OP
Joined
10 Feb 2006
Posts
2
Hi

Ive seen a few cards on e-bay that are going for about £35-£40
LCD is High Definition Ready LG32LX2R
 
Soldato
Joined
8 Dec 2005
Posts
10,535
Apparently no gfx card available @ the moment is fully HDCP compliant for true HD viewing. And yes that includes the 7800GTX512 + X1800/X1900s of this world!
 
Permabanned
Joined
20 Jan 2006
Posts
144
Location
Glasgow
Hmm, I didnt see a review showing buggy purevideo to be any less than ati's method of hd support, also last week or so ago it was said nvidia are going to release a driver to let all 6000/7000 cards do H.264 where as only top ATI card will do it (not sure on what model, I aint really into ATI.

For now even my agp 6800Ultra is fixed, granted you need buy nvidia dvd enoder but its claims to be best on market by many sites, I can half my cpu use during wmvHD and mpeg2 and even apple's and nero's h.264 is lower than it used to be after the drivers and encoder were going through new builds (btw you dont even need to watch the movies in WMP, so longs you got all the software installed and set up you can use power dvd or nero showtime or whatever.

I used to lower cpu to around 2.0gig and wmv HD 1080 would stutter so I needed approx 2.5gig to play 100% and at my current 2.8gig it aint a issue, but cpu usage was near 100% mostly, now its 50% ish or less and I can lower cpu all way to 1.6gig and still play 1080 perfect. (amd 2600m 32bit btw).
 
Permabanned
Joined
20 Jan 2006
Posts
144
Location
Glasgow
Some website last week had a 6600 nvidia card with it for reviewing,

Sony VGX-XL1 Digital Living System < trying to find review from last week it had this test card in it.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidia_purevideo_interview/page2.asp

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20060119095559.html

" The latest series of graphics processors from ATI – the Radeon X1300, X1600, X1800 and the yet-to-be-announced X1900 – already support decoding of H.264 codec, all the graphics cards makers need is to enable HDCP from the BIOS. Ujesh Desai, who is in charge of desktop graphics chips at Nvidia Corp. also said that a new driver version will enable H.264 decoding on graphics cards starting from the GeForce 6600. All Nvidia’s graphics chips starting from the GeForce FX support HDCP as well. "
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom