Worth going beyond a 5200?

[fieldeffect]

I've been flitting between a 5200 TV Out and a PVR-350 for my TV output. Although the PVR-350 is much better quality there are just too many problems, mostly crashes and losing sound sync, so i'm back to the 5200 which isn't too bad apart from the occasional tearing.

My question is, given that the 5200 is so cheap, is it worth going out and spending a lot of money on anything that would give better quality TV out or less tearing? I picked up my 5200 for about £40, so i'd need a noticable improvement in output to make it worth going out and spending £100 or more for something better.

I've thought about an Xcard. Sounds like my saviour, but i'm slightly put off by the 256 colour limit (how bad does this make OSD look?) and a post saying that there is a lot of OSD lag (I notice none at all with the PVR350).

If those two concerns with the XCard aren't such a big deal to people then I think that might be best, since I could then think about building the Mini-ITX client/server that I want (XCard taking the decoding load).

I usually experiment myself by going out and buying new bits, but that's starting to get expensive, so if anyone has any advice i'd much appreciate it

Nick.

[willemse]

Let me share my “cents” of experience.
I have a PVR 350 and FX 5200.
Tried recently a 6600GT but returned it as I did not see major quality improvement and concluded that as long as I use SDTV there is no point to get another more expensive card.

[fieldeffect]

Thanks, that's exactly the kind of mistake I was about to make

Looks like it's down to a straight fight between my existing 5200 and a XCard

Anyone have any experience with Xcards?

[jphhughes]

I'll probably jinks myself by saying this but SaveTv and the 350 have been rock solid of the past several months. I attruibute this to the driver upgrade I did on the 350. Running driver 1.18.21.22266. This may not be the most current driver but as they say "if its not broken don't fix it," or is it the other way around.

[teedublu]

I never have any tearing with my 5200
DXVA (hardware accel) is disabled
(enable = stutters on action, pans)
I don't do VMR9, just Overlay (3D is enabled though)
(that's probably where tearing is coming from)
Deinterlace is Default
TV-Out to SDTV
720x480 @ 60HZ
Sharpness on the TV set is adjusted down a bit (softer) to compensate for hi-risetime TV-Out which can cause ringing around "edges" (text).

TW

[jptaz]

I only use the XCard on my main system with the Plugin.

I can't play DVDs yet because the plug in does not support it yet.
The interface is very sluggish on my PC snce it is only P3 733Mhz.

Having said that I Have and HDTV with DVI and I used to use the DVI via the FX5200. THe quality out of DVI was great, but all the PC based codecs on my P3 733Mhz were crappy looking because of my slow PC and I had all sorts stuttering and fast action playback issues. For me the smooth playback is more important that dealing with a sluggish UI.

Also previously I used the XCard on my 25" Sony TV via SVideo and it looked better than the FX5200, but I used the FX5200 at that time because the OSD was more important than the minor picture quality improvement and at that point the stuttering and smooth playback was not as much of an issue since SageTVClient was less of a memory or processor hog and the fact it was only doing 720x480i instead of 1280x720P so it did not have to scale or deinterlace on the standard Def TV.

John