For my next trick... (Video card with TV-Out)

ShadoKat

Okay, so I dug an old PII 450 box out of my room and it is now taking up permanent residence in my TV room. This is good, because I no longer have to hook the TV up to my laptop every time I want to watch a video clip or access my .mp3 server on my stereo. Eventually I even plan to set up some older games (probably Quake 2, perhaps Quake 3 or Alice - may have to upgrade the motherboard for those), maybe even throw MAME on it. Anyway, I'm currently looking for a sub-$50 video card with a REALLY good TV-Out implementation that supports AGP 1x. I'm currently using an old TNT2 card, but the TV-Out is just pure crap.

For my best two bets and bang-for-the-buck, I'm looking at a couple of cards in particular. The first is a GeForce FX 5200, the second is a Radeon 9200SE. Which would give me the best TV performance? At 800x600? At 1024x768? Any other suggestions? The laptop uses an ATI Radeon 7500, and I've found that to be real nice, but I'm wondering if the chipset brand matters more or if certain actual card manufacturers have different TV-Out quality.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance!

PaK

I'll sell you my 5200.

-R

frosty

I dunno crap dude about the GeForce, but I think your not much up the scale on a 9200 than a 7500, until you go to a 9600 ATI. I soon shall upgrade mine to a 9800 so you could prolly have my old 7500 if you pay the ship to costs to Oregon. Goodluck!

ShadoKat

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I'll sell you my 5200.

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Umm.... Okay... but how does it LOOK on a TV screen?

tpe

the drivers for nvidea are much better than the ati ones, i have both and have had most of all the last incarnations since the rage ati cards, i think untill you get up to the 6800 series the nvidea drivers make the difference, the only other sugestion is if you want one with a built in tv tuner then i would go for one of the ati all in wonders because they are well intergrated the tuners are generally very reliable and they use up one less slot.

tpe

bearkub

I have to agree on the fact that trying to find a cheap TV Tuner card, particularly an ATI All-in-one card will be your best bet. I have used my laptop GF2Go! on my TV and it looks tolerable, at best. Besides that, in a machine that low powered, I would assume you would have a bottleneck between the video card and the CPU anyway with a newer generation card.

Just my personal opinion.

Jes

My 5900's doing a great job on the 28" in the living-room... Whenever I unpack the 5m cables that connects the two. xD

frosty

I never tried it on tv out, I say to my shame, :shame:

I guess it may not work either since I have cooked it a few times too a bit hot when silencing my rig.

ShadoKat

Thanks, all! I did consider going TV card route, but I'm not quite going there yet -- I don't want to watch TV on the PC, I want to watch PC on the TV Basically, I'm looking for which one will look and perform better in that regard. I'll be upgrading the entire rig, eventually, so either of the two previously mentioned will scale up nicely, and neither will kill my wallet. Is there a difference among brands, or is the chipset what's important?