[mythtv-users] Temporary graphics card for 780G system

[Owen Townend]

2008/12/1 kanetse at gmail.com <kane.tse at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:44 PM,  <twenty.seven at arcor.de> wrote:
>> Hi everyone!
>>
>> In a recent issue of the distinguished german computer magazine c't, there was a detailed proposal for an energy efficient and quiet AMD system. They tested all components for compatibility and found the resulting system to be remarkably quiet and power saving. I would like to build a MythTV box (combined BE/FE) based on these recommendations, as I trust in those guys and my own overview of current hardware is quite limited (though a built a couple of systems in the last 15 years). I just don't want to do any hardware experiments on my own and finally get a noisier system consuming 20 W more power than actually neccessary.
>>
>> BUT:
>> They used a mainboard with the AMD 780G chipset, which -- as far as I know -- is still not really usable for MythTV. Therefore, I would like to temporarily use a separate PCIe graphics card and hope for the 780G drivers to get usable in the next months. At the moment, I just watch SD TV, so I don't need HDTV and BlueRay support yet (but the system should, in principle, be capable of this). My TV is a recent Panasonic LCD, so I want to connect the MythBox via HDMI or DVI-to-HDMI.
>>
>> What do you think about this? Which graphic card would you recommend? I thought about the Nvidia Geforce 6600 as it is available with HDMI, cheap, and the Nvidia driver supports XvMC.
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>> twenty
>>
>
> Hi there,
>
> I have almost the same motherboard, the GA-MA78GM-S2H; with a
> different CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000.  I had similar problems getting
> the video to work properly.  I added a GeForce 7200GS PCI-e card into
> the machine.  At the time, there was no info about VDPAU, and I wanted
> a card with XvMC support.  It works perfectly, although with the CPU
> power was great enough that I was able to decode MPEG2 HDTV without
> the need for video-card acceleration.
>
> The 7200GS I bought has DVI, and I used a DVI-HDMI cable to hook it up
> to my HDTV.
>
> Given the recent information and excitement about VDPAU, I might have
> made a different choice in terms of the video card; but at the time
> XvMC was the best choice available for hardware acceleration.

Hey,
 I moved from a Phenom 9600/Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H to a 4850e in an
ECS A780GM-A for the power savings of the cpu and the extra pci slot
of the mobo.
 The 780G/4850e combination is running on a 22" 1680x1050 screen.
 Bottom line, it [mostly] works great.  The _only_ problem left is the
resolution issue (corruption on changing between channels of different
resolutions).

 On the flip side I have never had these issues with an nVidia card
and they have just released the VDPAU API which looks very promising.
I've seen passive half-height 8400GS for around AU$50 which may just
fit the bill[0].

Cheers,
Owen.

Footnotes:
--
[0] They really do exist: My local place as an example:
http://www.megaware.com.au/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=254_256&products_id=84410