ATI 690G/x1250 problems (2 Viewers)

[Lotsofjazz]

I have decided to buy a graphics card upgrade. For less then 100 dollars you can improve the graphics performace significantly.. luckely my MOBO has beside the on board X1250 a PCI express x16 slot for a GFX upgrade.

The lately introduced ATI HD4650 and HD4670 are cheap use low power(=less heat=less noise! 400watts power supply is sufficient). I bought a Gainward HD4650 with 1Gb DDR2 memory, 71 Euro's including shipping, with HDMI slot, DVI and even a normal VGA slot... Yeayeah, I know, it is overkill for a HTPC, but space in the HTPC is allso an issue and cooling. The somewhat older GFX cards are all bigger wider and noisier.. and a little more expensive... I have read quite a few reviews and all say it is the perfect upgrade for a HTPC to get ready for Blue ray movie play back and brilliant HDTV at 1080P.

I hope that with this upgrade HDTV and HD Movies will run smoothly.

The card will be delivered in a day or two, I will let you all know how it works out.

Lots

 

[BobMysterios]

Catalyst 8.10 has a change were it will force Component detection. This means you can reboot and not have your TV on and it will still detect the component TV.

For me, this is huge (and worth the price of admission -- reimage/resetup) my issues with MP stability can be resolved now with a nightly reboot.

Its not perfect, but its getting there.

 

[Lotsofjazz]

Ha!

I have installed my new graphics card gainward HD4650 with 1024 DDR2 memory this weekend, and all works fine. Installation was easy. I installed the software on CD-rom that came with the graphics card and works fine.

Huge difference with HD stuff playback over HDMI. 1080i @25Hz as wel as 720P @50 hz give brilliant picture quality, and now it runs smoothly without any stutter as I was used to with the on board X1250. Especially 1080i playback is now much much better, but when returning to PC stuff like internet explorer or something, I cant read the text due to the tiny characters, so I keep it at 720P, I have the impression on my TV that is the best setting.

Another huge improvement is that I can fully use hardware accelleration by the graphics card now, so when the CPU starts another task, like scanning my harddrive for virusses or downloading a windows update, it does not affect the smooth playback of TV or a movie. This really was a big issue with the x1250 using mainly the CPU for decoding digital TV and movies.

I also installed MP 1.0 RC3 this weekend, with the last SVN update, and everthing works fine with me
You can imagine I am a happy camper now, everything works!

There is only one disadvantage, that may be important for some of us: The cooling fan on the Gainward is rather noisy when running at full speed. But luckely the fan is regulated and responds to the temperature of the GPU, so when watching TV or a HD movie, the card is not running his full capacity at all so the GPU stays cool and the fan is not really running fast, if running at all. For gamers this might be an issue when running high frame rates. My experience till now is that when watching TV or a movie, the cooling fan is not turned on to its full speed, while History channel HD and discovery HD were on allmost all day yesterday.

Nevertheless I advise people with an all passive cooling system (very quiet) not to get this card but one of the more expensive passively cooled ones (heat pipes), for around $150,- you got a similar card (HD4650) with a passive cooling system.

Lots

 

[collaborator]

I tried to install RC3 yesterday but unfortunately it crashes while MP starting. I still use ATI drivers come with mobo ( had no problem with moded skins with RC2 ).
Do I need SP3 for XP for RC3 ?
Do I need latest ATI drivers for RC3 ?

 

[charli181]

I tried to install RC3 yesterday but unfortunately it crashes while MP starting. I still use ATI drivers come with mobo ( had no problem with moded skins with RC2 ).
Do I need SP3 for XP for RC3 ?
Do I need latest ATI drivers for RC3 ?

you will need latest service pack..... I am surprised it did not warn about that. You will also need windows Media player 11 as a pre-requisite

 

[collaborator]

I am using AMD CPU on mobo. Should I expect any problem with SP3 ?

 

[benjerry]

For me, it looks like flipy issue is resolved in 8.9.

Thanks! I had troubles with the new Blue3Wide skin, even after removing flipY, specifically in the My Video section witht he diagonal icons.
But after upgrading from catalyst 8.8 to the current 8.10 this problem has resolved.

 

[collaborator]

I bought a Lite-On DH401S Bluray driver over the weekend and installed PowerDVD 7.3 which comes with it.

PowerDVD suggest you to run BluRay Advisor application ( it is their own application ) to know whether your HW is capable to play BluRay. it gave me a only one warning about my GPU which might not be capable.

I installed PowerDVD and tried to play "Mamma Mia!" BlueRay but PowerDVD gave me an error "Failed to enable HDCP." which should not give as my both onboard X1250 GPU and my HDTV are HDCP capable.

I googled arround and found out most of the user having same issue with different configuration. I decided gave a try to AnyDVD to get rid of this copy protection problem. AnyDVD solved my HDCP problem but Video was stuttering.I thought I could give a try to overclocking for the firstime as I have BIOS Version 3A which is allowing me to overclock both CPU and GPU and I set the GPU 500Mhz. Voila ! It worked like a charm after overclock. Now my only problem is not getting DTS or DD over SPDIF. It seems this OEM PowerDVD 7.3 is not capable to that.

I will give another try to ArcSoft Theater Player tonight

 

[mikh]

something similar..

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/general-support-51/my-music-freezes-blue3-help-49321/

 

[dm15644]

Hi,

I can only recommend to upgrade to Vista. All previous problems are solved. 720p works out of the box with no tweaking. No stutter, no flicker, better image quality than before.

Regards,

jayrock