Shuttle XPC SK41G DX9 support? Cheap graphics card advice? (1 Viewer)

[McBainUK]

I have a Shuttle XPC SK41G and plan to get a Sapphire 550 pro Tuner Card. Media portal seems to be a wicked program to turn it in to a little media centre.

Problem is I don't think the on-board graphics support DX9
If this is true what cheap DX9 card should I get? (I have a another pc for games just need tv-out and DX9)

Oh, in the Shuttle I have a Athlon XP 1.8ghz with 1gb of RAM.

Would this one do?
http://www.ebuyer.com product code: 59320

Thanks in advance for your advice

 

[bwzuk]

I think the card you've linked to is a little underpowered. I've just stuck a geforce 6200 in my shuttle and I'm very happy with it. It was around 60 quid, and I managed to get one with a heatsink rather than a fan to keep the noise down. The picture quality via tv-out is vastly superior to my onboard graphics card and it seems to have taken a lot of load off the cpu as well. Alternativly I was also considering one of the geforce 5000 series, which are very cheap now, although they don't have the mpeg decoding acceleration you get with the 6000 series cards. This makes quite a difference particularly if you are using the nvidia decoders.

Here's where I got my card
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-GF6225