Wanting to add HDTV support want to make sure my gear is up to par

[m1abrams]

So just got a new Samsung LNT-4665F LCD TV. Wow is it pretty, however watching SDTV on it seems like such a waste and watching Live TV drives me nuts. So I want to make my Sage box HDTV capable. Or do something drastic like get an TivoHD.

So my current setup is:
Athlon X2 3800+
512MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600XT -> connected to TV via DVI->HDMI cable running at 1920x1080
2x PVR-150 connected to 2 digital cable boxes via S-video


Now I am thinking of getting an HDHomerun and just getting the ClearQAM channels. I currently can watch them live using the builtin tuner on the TV, so I know Comcast is broadcasting them in the clear. Might before hand grab an HD tuner from Comcast and see if I can use firewire.

My main concern is will my current hardware support HDTV? I am thinking my video card might be my bottleneck. I am pretty limited on upgrading since I only have AGP on the motherboard. Best I could probably go to is a Nvidia 7600GT. Would that card do well?

Lastly, should I just give in and get a Tivo HD. Prior to Sage I was a huge Tivo fan and that box looks very tempting. Downsides I see with it is the "fee", lack of comskip (i use SA), and I think SageTV has better Favorites and conflict management. I do not use the server/client features of Sage so that is not an issue for me. Tivo though would make things much simpler for me and my wife.

Anyhow, any advice is very much welcome.

[visiontim]

You should find out how reliable comcast is about giving out/installing cablecards cause you're going to need one with the Tivo box.

As far as running HD on your current box, I think you need to bulk up the RAM and get a newer video card (there has been some action in getting newer cards for AGP lately) and you should be fine.

[m1abrams]

Ok yea I was thinking of going to 1GB of RAM, I do not see any need for more.

As for video cards, what do people think of the Nvidia 7600GT for HDTV work?

[mayamaniac]

As far as I know, for HD playback, anything from the Geforce 6600GT and up will handle HD just fine. Processor wise, just make sure you have at least a Pentium 4 2.8ghz or above. This is for good VMR9 performance. You can probably get away with slower hardware in overlay mode.

[MoopZilla]

I'm running Gigabyte Fanless 7600GS cards on both my server and client machines. They work perfectly, now that I have my HDHR set up

Also, the x2 3800+ processor should be fine for HD.

[omega]

I have the same video card as MoopZilla in my client, with an AMD X2 3800+, and it plays back full-screen HD content just fine on my 22" LCD (at 1680x1050) using the nVidia PureVideo decoders. CPU usage tends to be around 40-50%.

[autoboy]

The 7600GT is the standard of the mpeg2 1080i world. You have to make sure you enable Inverse Telecine in the drivers and you will get very a very nice picture. However, your 9600XT is also enough for HD, you will just miss out on some of the advanced picture quality enhancements that comes with the new cards like advanced scaling of 480i and advanced hardware deinterlacing.

I ran a 9600xt in my HD HTPC with good results. Swithing to a 7300LE did not yeild a huge improvement in HD quality, but I did see a sharper SD picture with less jaggies. The 8600GT and 2600Pro are good cards for the new HD-DVD and Bluray formats, and can do h.264 acceleration, but the drivers are still really buggy.

An AGP 7600GT is probably your best bet for stability, unless of course you want to be on the bleeding edge and you can get an AGP 2600pro. However, with the bleeding egde comes problems that might make your head explode.

[m1abrams]

autoboy - thank you very much for the info. I was looking at the AGP 2600Pro also. I would like to improve my SD quality as well.

[autoboy]

You can try the 2600pro if you want. I was unable to get it working on my setup, but you may have more luck. Plent of people have it working. The AGP versions are actually pretty cheap. If you have problems, there is a massive thread on AVSforum about them