- September 15, 2006
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Folks,
I've recently completely upgraded my MP system and I thought I would share a rather surprising outcome...
First some background. I was moving from a basically working system that handled SD video using DVB-T tuners with a 32" 1366x768 display pretty well. However Freesat and BBC-HD tempted me to upgrade to a 1080p panel plus a new tuner abd my old system could not handle the job.
My old system had on board video that was not easy to upgrade and limited PCI slots (so I wanted to avoid that problem). I found that even with coreavc as a codec the cpu was maxed out, so I really wanted to go hardware decode if I could. I also wanted to use HDMI for both video and audio is possible.
So after reading around a lot (and rejecting the popular 780 motherboard solution because I wanted to go Intel processor for this build), I decided that an ATI HD3450 card fitted the bill. I wanted to keep noise down and so chose a Saphire Radion HD3450 with passive cooling. In retrospect this was a mistake....
1. When I opened the box it did not have HDMI output (my fault for not reading the fine print).
2. The magic dongle needed to enable HDMI seems almost impossible to get hold of in the UK. I managed to buy the wrong type easily enough though (I got the older one thet works with the 2000 series!).
3. This thing runs very hot 70 C when doing nothing and 85 C when decoding SD content.
4. The hardware decoding worked pretty well. I was seeing less that 10% cpu usage when playing both SD and HD content. So very happy with that. HD looked awesome!
5. However I was not so happy with the quality of SD decoding. Further investigation revealed that even with PDVD8 codecs this card did not perform high end (motion adaptive and motion vector), de-interlace when running at 1080p output.
So the card was good (and had a very good price). But did not really work as well as I had hoped. After much searching and thinking and reading I decided to give ATI another chance, but this time with a 256MB MSI Radeon HD 3650 OC. With this board...
1. It has an hdmi output built into the board. Audio out just worked as soon as I plugged it in.
2. The card has a fan on it which I was not so keen on, this fan out of the box is noisy. However the card uses variable gpu and memory clock speeds. When doing nothing the temperature was 28 C. When decoding video it was only 35 C. As an experiment I unplugged the fan connector. Without the fan the temperature was only 58 C when decoding video!
3. The extra gpu power means that it can happily run full vector-motion de-interlacing and also has sharpening and noise filtering options enabled (both were disabled on 3450).
So all in all paying that little bit more for a card gave me much more of what I wanted. But the thing that surprised me the most was just how much better at power/heat management this card is. I now run it with the fan turned way down (using a Zalman fan controller that I had left over from another build), you can't hear it at all and the board runs happily at 40 C when decoding video. The hdmi audio out works fine, with no messing around with drivers or dongles... I'm very happy with this card....
Hope this is of interest...
Andy
I've recently completely upgraded my MP system and I thought I would share a rather surprising outcome...
First some background. I was moving from a basically working system that handled SD video using DVB-T tuners with a 32" 1366x768 display pretty well. However Freesat and BBC-HD tempted me to upgrade to a 1080p panel plus a new tuner abd my old system could not handle the job.
My old system had on board video that was not easy to upgrade and limited PCI slots (so I wanted to avoid that problem). I found that even with coreavc as a codec the cpu was maxed out, so I really wanted to go hardware decode if I could. I also wanted to use HDMI for both video and audio is possible.
So after reading around a lot (and rejecting the popular 780 motherboard solution because I wanted to go Intel processor for this build), I decided that an ATI HD3450 card fitted the bill. I wanted to keep noise down and so chose a Saphire Radion HD3450 with passive cooling. In retrospect this was a mistake....
1. When I opened the box it did not have HDMI output (my fault for not reading the fine print).
2. The magic dongle needed to enable HDMI seems almost impossible to get hold of in the UK. I managed to buy the wrong type easily enough though (I got the older one thet works with the 2000 series!).
3. This thing runs very hot 70 C when doing nothing and 85 C when decoding SD content.
4. The hardware decoding worked pretty well. I was seeing less that 10% cpu usage when playing both SD and HD content. So very happy with that. HD looked awesome!
5. However I was not so happy with the quality of SD decoding. Further investigation revealed that even with PDVD8 codecs this card did not perform high end (motion adaptive and motion vector), de-interlace when running at 1080p output.
So the card was good (and had a very good price). But did not really work as well as I had hoped. After much searching and thinking and reading I decided to give ATI another chance, but this time with a 256MB MSI Radeon HD 3650 OC. With this board...
1. It has an hdmi output built into the board. Audio out just worked as soon as I plugged it in.
2. The card has a fan on it which I was not so keen on, this fan out of the box is noisy. However the card uses variable gpu and memory clock speeds. When doing nothing the temperature was 28 C. When decoding video it was only 35 C. As an experiment I unplugged the fan connector. Without the fan the temperature was only 58 C when decoding video!
3. The extra gpu power means that it can happily run full vector-motion de-interlacing and also has sharpening and noise filtering options enabled (both were disabled on 3450).
So all in all paying that little bit more for a card gave me much more of what I wanted. But the thing that surprised me the most was just how much better at power/heat management this card is. I now run it with the fan turned way down (using a Zalman fan controller that I had left over from another build), you can't hear it at all and the board runs happily at 40 C when decoding video. The hdmi audio out works fine, with no messing around with drivers or dongles... I'm very happy with this card....
Hope this is of interest...
Andy