New video card: 8500GT

[GTwannabe]

Upgraded my HTPC from a 7300LE to a passively cooled Gigabyte 8500GT:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125062

What an improvement! The 7300LE stuttered during camera pans and fast action in 1080i. Overclocking the snot out of it improved the situtation, but it still wasn't perfect and it ran 90C+ under load. I installed the 8500GT and now it's running like a champ. High bitrate, fast action 1080i is silky smooth. The card supports HDCP and offloads H.264 content, so I'm future-proofed there. Fanless design means no moving parts to add noise and wear out/gum up. The best part was the low price (~$100), making it perfect for a dedicated video playback PC.

The only issue I've had so far is that the XP drivers are Betas and the nVidia Control Panel won't open. Hopefully a driver update will fix that.

[autoboy]

I'm glad to hear that. I have no problems running my 7300LE at 720p resolution. Why are you running 1080i? Do you have a CRT TV?

[GTwannabe]

1080i input, 1600x1200 display. The 7300LE did OK with 65mbps and 80mbps 1080i sources where it could play back as Film (24fps). However, Video content (30fps) would be doubled to 60fps by PureVideo, and the 7300LE didn't have enough memory bandwidth to push more than 45-50fps.

[chrisc16]

GT,

Are you running Windows XP or Vista on your client? I think I read something about how the new PureVideo HD was only available on Vista right now.

I want to upgrade to an 8500GT also, but not if I have to upgrade to Vista also.

Thanks,
Chris

[lobosrul]

GTwannabe: You do know that in order to get h.264 acceleration you need seperate decoder software. I think the only viable dshow filter for this is Cyberlink PowerDVD h.264 decoder (yes it can be used with sage)?

I'm probably getting an 8500 GT soon. With my client HTPC, I either have some stuttering on 1080i (non-telecined), fast motion, like hockey. Or I overclock my 6800 AGP and get a lockup a couple times a week. And I have to switch to overlay mode for some of my h.264 encodes (what a pain).

The bad news is I have a socket 754 chip, the good news is Newegg stocks a socket 754 pci-e board (a rarity)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813123002

Edit: Yikes, dont tell me you need vista for gpu acceleration. Pfft on that.

Edit2: According to a thread at avsforum, h.264 acceleration is VISTA only, but they expect an XP release in June.

[GTwannabe]

Originally Posted by chrisc16

GT,

Are you running Windows XP or Vista on your client? I think I read something about how the new PureVideo HD was only available on Vista right now.

I want to upgrade to an 8500GT also, but not if I have to upgrade to Vista also.

Thanks,
Chris

XP... yes, PureVideo HD is not supported in the current 158.22 drivers. However, it will be added for XP at some point in the future.

[autoboy]

Originally Posted by GTwannabe

1080i input, 1600x1200 display. The 7300LE did OK with 65mbps and 80mbps 1080i sources where it could play back as Film (24fps). However, Video content (30fps) would be doubled to 60fps by PureVideo, and the 7300LE didn't have enough memory bandwidth to push more than 45-50fps.

Hmm, I though that broadcast HD maxed out at 20mbps. Also, isn't the video card outputting everything to 60Hz? A 24fps source would be converted to 60Hz with 3:2 pulldown which is harder than 30Hz video that just needs to be doubled.

[GTwannabe]

Originally Posted by autoboy

Hmm, I though that broadcast HD maxed out at 20mbps. Also, isn't the video card outputting everything to 60Hz? A 24fps source would be converted to 60Hz with 3:2 pulldown which is harder than 30Hz video that just needs to be doubled.

I believe the issue with the 7300LE is that it didn't have enough memory bandwidth to drive my 1600x1200 display. 3:2 pulldown is handled by the PureVideo portion of the GPU. However, pushing 60fps at high res was just too much for slow 64-bit RAM.

The thing I like best about the 8500GT is that I can now watch smooth HD without FSE enabled. FSE is still far too buggy for my tastes.

[Scriber]

Originally Posted by GTwannabe

Upgraded my HTPC from a 7300LE to a passively cooled Gigabyte 8500GT:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125062

What an improvement! The 7300LE stuttered during camera pans and fast action in 1080i. Overclocking the snot out of it improved the situtation, but it still wasn't perfect and it ran 90C+ under load. I installed the 8500GT and now it's running like a champ. High bitrate, fast action 1080i is silky smooth. The card supports HDCP and offloads H.264 content, so I'm future-proofed there. Fanless design means no moving parts to add noise and wear out/gum up. The best part was the low price (~$100), making it perfect for a dedicated video playback PC.

The only issue I've had so far is that the XP drivers are Betas and the nVidia Control Panel won't open. Hopefully a driver update will fix that.

Same card here. Have you seen any issues on waking from standby? My "new" Client box (XP w/a i915G mobo) won't resume from Standby - it wakes and the fans come on but nothing else - no video or other activity; just hangs. Poked around a bit in the NV forums and I think its an NV driver issue - not so sure these drivers are ready for prime time. Standby is a must for me.

[GTwannabe]

Originally Posted by Scriber

Same card here. Have you seen any issues on waking from standby? My "new" Client box (XP w/a i915G mobo) won't resume from Standby - it wakes and the fans come on but nothing else - no video or other activity; just hangs. Poked around a bit in the NV forums and I think its an NV driver issue - not so sure these drivers are ready for prime time. Standby is a must for me.

My system resumes from Standby just fine. However, after waking up, every video played in the SageTV client stutters horribly. Killing and reopening the client does nothing... I have to reboot the computer to get smooth video again. I set the machine to just shutdown instead of standby as a temporary workaround.

I found a registry hack that enables the old-style nVidia control panel, so now I can get to my settings. Would be nice if it just worked out of the box... I hope nVidia puts out better XP drivers soon, but it looks like they're focusing all their effort on the Vista driver tree.

[akenis]

Just got my 8500GT along with new mobo, etc. Can't get the control panel open. What's up with that? Running 158.27 drivers from Gigabyte's website.

Where's this reg hack?

[Paul H]

Zipzoomfly.com has this with free shipping:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...uctCode=321125

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by akenis

Just got my 8500GT along with new mobo, etc. Can't get the control panel open. What's up with that? Running 158.27 drivers from Gigabyte's website.

Where's this reg hack?

I had the same problem and pulled out what little hair I have left trying to solve it. There is some wierdness in the .inf files in the nvidia drivers. I dropped the .inf and .txt files in the attachment in this post into the folder where the nvidia drivers are extracted and then proceeded with the install. Use the files in the 32b subfolder in the zip file for 32bit Windows XP, US version. Note that this will make your drivers no longer WHQL certified, but you will get the new control panel to show up. HTH

Aloha,
Mike

[akenis]

Thanks...I'll try that. I just did an uninstall and tried an install w/ the CD that it shipped with. Now the control panel opens!!! But it's blank

[Keenan]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

I had the same problem and pulled out what little hair I have left trying to solve it. There is some wierdness in the .inf files in the nvidia drivers. I dropped the .inf and .txt files in the attachment in this post into the folder where the nvidia drivers are extracted and then proceeded with the install. Use the files in the 32b subfolder in the zip file for 32bit Windows XP, US version. Note that this will make your drivers no longer WHQL certified, but you will get the new control panel to show up. HTH

Aloha,
Mike

I'm a little confused on this part,

I dropped the .inf and .txt files in the attachment in this post into the folder where the nvidia drivers are extracted and then proceeded with the install

when I install the drivers it's a self-extracting/installing program, how do you add the linked the files to the install folder? I'm guessing I need to download a zip formatted file of the Nvidia drivers??

[MeInMaui]

When you run the installer, the files should be extracted to:

C:\nvidia\win2kxp\(version)\

Cancel the installation and copy the new files into this folder. There should be a setup.exe file that you can run from the same folder to proceed with the installation. HTH

Aloha,
Mike

[Keenan]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

When you run the installer, the files should be extracted to:

C:\nvidia\win2kxp\(version)\

Cancel the installation and copy the new files into this folder. There should be a setup.exe file that you can run from the same folder to proceed with the installation. HTH

Aloha,
Mike

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

[akenis]

Worked for me. Something went wrong the first time, and my resolution wasn't available. I uninstalled again and then ran the unaltered 58.22 drivers and it worked fine. The "hack" has something to do with certain files not being registered with the system. So hopefully future driver upgrades will take fine.

Q: Is there an advantage to using the drivers from the card's manufacturer's (Gigabyte in my case) over the drivers from Nvidia.com? It's odd that Gigabyte's driver had a more recent date and a higher 58.XX number. There files didn't work either. Control Panel opened, but it was blank.

Q: You guys running Overlay or VRM9 w or w/o FSE? I actually think Overlay and 3D enabled looked smoother than VRM9. FSE had no increase in quality from my perspective, and reduced stability a bit. Changes from window to full screen are snappy with overlay....slow and buggy with FSE.

[Keenan]

It worked for me first time, thanks.

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by akenis

Q: You guys running Overlay or VRM9 w or w/o FSE? I actually think Overlay and 3D enabled looked smoother than VRM9. FSE had no increase in quality from my perspective, and reduced stability a bit. Changes from window to full screen are snappy with overlay....slow and buggy with FSE.

I'm running overlay on an MSI 8600GTS. I had some very annoying problems with out-of-order frames watching SD video using VMR9 (oddly, I never had a problem with HD). FSE isn't really an option either because my wife loves to pop up the Opera web browser to read news stories she sees on the RSS ticker. Sage doesn't resume from sleep properly with FSE enabled.

Aloha,
Mike