[OTHER] Looking for PCI video card w/ HW accel. (1 Viewer)

[mpab]

I have an HTPC made out of an outdated 2GHz Intel Celeron with 1gb DDR RAM. Win XP.

The bottleneck is the integrated Intel graphics with 8mb shared memory and the lack of an AGP port in the mainboard. MediaPortal crawls when scrolling through menus, but it's usable.
The unusable part is 720p video: it just cannot make it.
I was thinking of buying a $60 PCI video card to keep from buying a new computer, but I'm afraid it will solve nothing about the 720p videos.

Does anyone have experience about this? Does hardware acceleration work in a PCI DX9 video card in a slow computer (such as a Celeron) or is it worthless?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I would not spend anything on a old pc which did not support either agp or pci-e, just replaced my daughters dead agp card, but if it had been pci, really would have scrapped and put the money towards a new motherboard with integrated gpu.

:sorry:

 

[funkstar]

I'm with PD on this one. I know you don't want to ditch this hardware, but really there comes a point where you just have to bite the bullit and get something newer.

 

[Spragleknas]

I 100 % agree on what PD says.