[mythtv-users] ATI Radeon 9250 Vs Nvidia GeForce 5200

[Bob]

Steven Adeff wrote:
> On 2/3/06, Bob <spam at homeurl.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>>Sorry for rehashing an old topic but it is quite important as I'll be
>>getting 3 of them for my current crop of Athlon XP powered ECS K7S5A
>>systems that I already have passive CPU heat syncs for, and will pick up
>>silent PSUs for to run as silent diskless frontends as a retirement plan
>>for them (going to build, big, low power, back, end... must, stop,
>>grinning... must, stop, thinking, in staccato...)
> 
> which version K7S5A do you have? I have a 1.1 with a XP 2200+ on it.
> I'd love to be able to put one of the 3000+ XP if it has the
> horsepower to play HD but ECS's web page shows it only supporting up
> to the 2600+. Would the 2600+ be fast enough? will the board support a
> faster XP and they just haven't updated their webpage?

I have 3 version 3.1s but they all support any XP, the problem is the 
max Front Side Bus is 133Mhz (266 DDR) without OCing and XPs after the 
2600+ use a 166Mhz (333 DDR) FSB so you’d be under clocking them.

There are however 2 way round this.

1. (easiest but more expensive) Get an Athlon XP-M 3200, the XP-Ms still 
use an FSB of 133Mhz (266 DDR).

2. (harder but cheaper) get a standard Athlon XP 3200 and using some of 
the links down \/ there, Unlock it (make it think it’s an XP-M), & raise 
the max multipliers to allow the chip to run at the same frequency as it 
would if it had an FSB of 166Mhz (333 DDR), (I think it’s x18 but I 
haven’t done it in a while so check)

Without a modified powernow module the kernel will not do frequency 
scaling on a K7S5A, see these threads
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-183519-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6923
a useful resource for the K7S5A is the ezboard forum
http://p199.ezboard.com/bk7s5amotherboardforum

More info on OCing Athlon XPs
http://fab51.com/index-e.html
http://www.cpuheat.wz.cz/html/AXP_multiplier/AXP_Multiplier.htm
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2004/guides/unlockbartonwk43/unlockbartonwk43-1.htm
http://www.tomshardware.com/2001/11/12/plastic_surgery/index.html

> As for the nvidia vs ati, I think the only real difference is XvMC,
> and possible pink bar issue with  some radeon chipsets.

But since the r280 chip in the Radeon 9250 has MPEG decompression 
"Assistance" for windows and the specks are known (hence the OS driver) 
is it not possible the OS driver (& MythTV) might one day make use of 
that feature offloading the CPU, maybe even more than XvMC and maybe 
opening up the possibility of HDTV?