Upgrade video adapter?

[robk]

Being confused by reading about video cards, I thought I'd ask for opinions. I'm upgrading a few computers in my office and have extra video cards that may or may not improve my dedicated SageTV machine. Right now, Sage runs on a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H, 2Gig DDR2 Ram, Athlon II X2 240 Regor 2.8mHz, with a Radeon HD4550 PCI-e connected by DVI to a 23" monitor at 1680 X 1050, Win7, HD PVR and a PVR-1600, using Arcsoft decoder (an older asvid.ax that uses hardware acceleration v. 2.27.278.98). Sage 7.1.9 runs fine, no complaints except whenever I FF or Rew, it pauses with the spinning circle for 4 to 6 seconds. I don't know why but it may be due to the 1 TB of drive space getting full - about 40G free on one drive, 55G free on the other. I run 2 partitions on one 500G drive, 50G OS, 450G data (big clusters), the other 500G drive is just data again with 64K clusters.

So, here's the question: Will replacing the existing HD4550 (512G - DDR3) with an nVidia 9500GT (1G - DDR2) improve anything? I can't imagine a better picture quality than I'm getting from a Cable Box, it's near perfect except for any compression they use on some channels. OTA HD is crystal clear. Anyone have opinions on whether a Radeon or an nVidia works better with AMD hardware, maybe to speed up seeking? The Radeon seems to have a slightly softer sharpness than other computers with nVidia cards - when I swapped monitors - anyone have experience with both and can compare sharpness and color brilliance?

Sorry if this matter is already beat to death, I would just like to see if anyone has any comments or suggestions, since I am juggling video cards and it would be total guesswork if I randomly swapped out a few cards in 3 or 4 computers. What I should do is leave the Sage machine alone, but as a lot of other people here, I can't resist....

Thanks-
Rob

[SafetyBob]

Rob, I don't think playing around with video cards will do for you what I am reading I think you want. NO MORE SLOWNESS.....

Oh, I have been there.....I think you would be better served to stick another 2GB of memory in there and see if that speeds things up. If it doesn't noticably improve performance, others will be able to advise better on hard drive options. I personally think they are the problem and adding memory temporarly will prove that true or untrue.

I have been kicking around how to maximize performance without going crazy on a raid setup, especially since I would like at least 3 to 4TB on my next build.....I haven't been in the game recently to tell you to dump this hard drive model for that. I wish I could....it's sounds like you need crunching power and something is holding you back.......

Bob E.

[robk]

You're probably right, the bottleneck is the hard drives. I've been looking at the inexpensive HighPoint SATA III adapter cards paired with a 1 or 2 TB WD SATA III (6Mbps) drive. Only problem is I have to look up whether I have an empty PCIe 2X slot for the controller or lose speed using a PCIe 1X slot.

Rob