Suggestion for cheap PCI-E card

[dreamliner77]

I'm building a system for a buddy and need a suggestion for a cheap PCI-E card. Here's my criteria: I'd like to spend less than $50, preferably passively cooled, dedicated memory. He will not be playing games. I just want something stable. It will be going into an AMD X2 system.

 

[LordOfLA]

anything cheap. they are all just as bad as each other. But all are fine for web/email/office type applications.

 

[dreamliner77]

Any manufacturer I should avoid for lack of reliability?

 

[LordOfLA]

at that end of the market they aren't powerful enough to be unreliable.

 

[dreamliner77]

I know my Powercooler ATI 9250 AGP has been running great since I got it. It can't possibly be true that only high end gamer-class cards are reliable...

 

[epk]

any known brand is ok nowadays (evga, xfx, asus, msi, sapphire, powercooler, etc.)

like with any hardware they may fail, but you got reliable support

 

[dreamliner77]

Think I'm going with an Asus X1300.

 

[LordOfLA]

it tends to be the high end cards that are unreliable as they are pushing the limits of what all that silicon can do and get to such crazy temperatures with the parallel processing they do.

 

[LeeJend]

Yes, that ASUS 1300 looks like the best deal for under $50.

Nvidia has some close offerings (7100) cheaper but I beleive the ATI cards have built in codec accelerators for watching videos and encoding/decoding. So for $10 more I'd do the ATI card. Not sure I ever heard of Nvidia having any hardware video acceleration.

 

[LordOfLA]

they all do hardware mpeg2 decode when used with WMP.

you need 6000/7000/8000 series for the rest.

 

[epk]

i think with nvidia cards you need the purevideo thing (also needed for h.264 hardware assisted decoding)
wmv hd acceleration doesn't need any extra software

i have no idea how the avivo works on ati cards

 

[LordOfLA]

you only need purevideo if you want it tio hardware assist with anyting other than normal WMV and MPEG2. WMV HD, etc need purevideo and the gpu's woth purevideo support.

 

[epk]

are you sure you don't need purevideo for mpeg2 hardware assisted decoding?
i know for sure that wmv (sd or hd) doesn't need it and that h.264 needs it, but i have no idea how it works for mpeg2

 

[vertigo]

all ATI x1300 (or maybe radeon 9500, my memory is sketchy ) series and geforce 5200 and up do at least mpeg2 decoding. all cards geforce 6600GT and up are capable of H264 decoding. not sure about which line of ATI does H264, me being an nvidia user. i guess the x1300 and up

WMV acceleration, in ATI (and i'm sure the same goes with nvidia) just needs recent drivers and microsoft's decoders.

they all do hardware mpeg2 decode when used with WMP.

player is irrelevant, what's needed is the proper card, drivers and decoder. almost every commercial decoder supports DXVA, including the two most popular, WinDVD/Intervideo and PowerDVD/Cyberlink

 

[X-Istence]

I personally prefer Nvidia, since they release drivers for open source operating systems like FreeBSD.