[ATI] Cool and Quiet? (1 Viewer)

[jimwin]

I'm getting a fair bit of heat build up in my media pc, and it looks like its being caused by the fanless nvidia 8500 card, which seems to be hottest thing in the case, and as is very large, so also restricts air flow. It doesn't help that its in an Antec NSK 1300 case, so there is already bad air flow.

My thought is to replace it with an ATI card, either a 4350 or 4550. I'm thinking that one with a quiet fan will extract the hot air better, and hopefully not be too noisy.

The PC is used for movies etc only, no games. Will the lower spec 4350 be good enough for DXVA MKV files and also Blue Rays? Will they both run cool while doing the DXVA thing? I've seen people complaining of issues with 1080i Blue Rays with the lower spec cards?

Thanks!

 

[kiwijunglist]

i did a fair bit of research before upgrading from my onbaord HD3200, in the end i thought that HD4670 was best, i got one, and i'm very happy.

EDIT: I don't have bluray drive.

 

[grrfield]

Hello,

I have changed my graphics card from a passive NVIDIA 6600 to a passive ATI SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4550 512MB DDR3 LRTL some time ago. The HTPC is much cooler with the new ATI card. With this ATI card, I had some deinterlacing problems under Windows XP in the beginning. After changing to Windows VISTA and activating EVR and DXVA, the deinterlacing is working with all formats (SD-, HD-TV, DVD) even with 1080i BD's. The CPU load during 1080i/p BD playback is about 20%. The picture is much better than with the old NVIDIA card especially for SD content such as DVD. I'm using the ATI 9.8 driver, Cyberlink PowerDVD 7.3 for BD playback and the Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 codecs for DVD, SD- and HD-TV.
I've heard, that the deinterlacing problems with 1080i HD content are related to the memory bandwith on the graphics card. My graphics card has DDR3 memory, some of the cards (also higher spec. cards like 4650/4670) have DDR2 memory only. In the AVS-Forum, people reported deinterlacing problems with such DDR2 cards.

grrfield

 

[kiwijunglist]

my HD4670 has DDR3 i think all of the HD4670s that i have seen use DDR3/GDDR3

 

[jimwin]

Thanks for the advice. I ended up buying a HD 4350 OC (factory overclocked to 650mhz), and its working fine for me so far. Much smaller card, and seems to run cooler than the old Nvidia. Works fine on DXVA up to 1080p. Not tried a blu ray yet, but I'm pretty confident it'll be fine. Not found any interlaced material to test yet.