adventures in 6600gt agp land...

[GbrNole]

well i'll preface this by saying that everythig that has been stated about purevideo quality is true - quite the upgrade over my current 5900xt and more than i expected....

but...

the card, an msi 6600gt, came mostly doa.

when i put the card in initially i got zero video. nil, nada, zip. the pc i stuck it in has a good quality 300 watt PS but a 350w is usually recommended so i figured that may be the problem. i unplugged just about everything save the boot drive and a dvd rom and pulled half my mem and all my pci cards.

still nothing. reseated the card again and voila! it was that simple - well no actually it wasn't as i later found.

anyway i set the system up while the card was alive and watched king arthur with just nvdvd 1.00.67 with dxva and vpp turned on. nothing else no ffdshow or anything. the only other variable was using mediator for playback. the quality was stunning with no ffdshow in the loop.

tried the same movie in sage and the results were still good but not nearly as good. not as smooth nor as crisp but still an upgrade over the 5900xt. this has now increased my desire to get mec 2005 again...

now the bad - rebooted the pc to put the extra ram back in and that was the end of the card - tried in in 3 seperate pc's now and no video at post whatsoever

rma time...

[stanger89]

It won't make you feel any better, but I haven't had much luck with MSI either. They seem to have trouble with AGP in my experience. I know have 2 MSI boards with AGP problems. Just some random thoughts.

Oh, and an FYI, I'm realizing more and more just how much a load of crap the "300W" rating on power supplies is. My 400W power supply failed to spin up all 10 of my HDDs, but my el-cheapo 300W one is running happy as can be.

If a $25 300W Fortron FSP300-60PN can power 9 7200rpm HDDs, 1 10000rpm HDD, a DVD burner, Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB Corsair PC 3200 (2x256), and a Radeon 9500, and 4 80mm fans, really makes me wonder why I see all these people running 500W+ power supplies.

I think we need a huge re-education (or maybe just plain old education) on choosing power supplies.

Anyway, back OT, glad to hear you liked what you saw. I know I was really surprised when I installed .67 and it was a noticeable improvement over .58. My next step is to try the PreferYV12 tweak I saw on AVS.

[thatdude90210]

Originally Posted by stanger89

If a $25 300W Fortron FSP300-60PN can power 9 7200rpm HDDs, 1 10000rpm HDD, a DVD burner, Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB Corsair PC 3200 (2x256), and a Radeon 9500, and 4 80mm fans, really makes me wonder why I see all these people running 500W+ power supplies.

Yeah, I wonder about that too. And those Fortrons are pretty good quality for a reasonable price. I have a Fortron PSP350 powering an A64 3500+ with an x800xtpe with no issues.

[stanger89]

Of course when you dive into the specs a little more it begins to make sense:
FSP300-60PN
+3.3V max 28A
+5V max 30A
+12V max 15A
Total 3.3+5V output 200W
Silencer 410
+3.3V max 28A
+5V max 32A
+12V max 23A
Total 3.3+5V output also 200W

Despite 1 being a 300W and one being a 400W the specs are really similar, with the extra 100W coming from the extra current capacity on the 12V rail.

All in all, the Fortron was the best $25 I've ever spent

[mlbdude]

Dang it! I wanted to hear how it looked with ffdshow in software mode. If it sputters back to life for a bit give it a try .

[GbrNole]

right before i let it fly with the nvidia decoders dxva and vpp i gave it a whirl in my regular mediator settings which are dscaler5 set to yv12 and ffdshow 1920x1080 resize, 0.5 luma sharpen, 0.15 swscaler sharpen and 20 denoise.

it looked maybe 10 to 15% better than what i have right now but the real factor was the image being darn close to being the same w/out ffdshow and dxva enabled with .00.67

if my card was working and i owned mce 2005 sage would be taking a serious backseat now because the image was just that much better under mediator at 1080i.

the component dongle was a fairly painless setup BTW. it defaults to 480i and you have to somewhat fanagle it to 1080i for a couple of mins but once locked inthe text is crisp with regular flicker and underscan is easily enabled but best of all you can shift the desktop around very easily to compensate some more which you can't do via dvi out.

lets just say i can't wait to get the sucker back!

[stanger89]

Just curious, but were you using the VPP filter too? If so, you weren't running in DXVA mode.

[kny3twalker]

if my card was working and i owned mce 2005 sage would be taking a serious backseat now because the image was just that much better under mediator at 1080i.

this is where I am at
I am thinking I will give SageTV a little longer
but after using mediator and nstant media

the image quality is so much better and the picture is so much smoother in playback

I have not been using SageTV for playback recently
(still recording) but I am waiting for 2.3 if we get one instead of 3.0 beta or whatever

[tealcomp]

Originally Posted by GbrNole

well i'll preface this by saying that everythig that has been stated about purevideo quality is true - quite the upgrade over my current 5900xt and more than i expected....

but...

the card, an msi 6600gt, came mostly doa.

when i put the card in initially i got zero video. nil, nada, zip. the pc i stuck it in has a good quality 300 watt PS but a 350w is usually recommended so i figured that may be the problem. i unplugged just about everything save the boot drive and a dvd rom and pulled half my mem and all my pci cards.

still nothing. reseated the card again and voila! it was that simple - well no actually it wasn't as i later found.

anyway i set the system up while the card was alive and watched king arthur with just nvdvd 1.00.67 with dxva and vpp turned on. nothing else no ffdshow or anything. the only other variable was using mediator for playback. the quality was stunning with no ffdshow in the loop.

tried the same movie in sage and the results were still good but not nearly as good. not as smooth nor as crisp but still an upgrade over the 5900xt. this has now increased my desire to get mec 2005 again...

now the bad - rebooted the pc to put the extra ram back in and that was the end of the card - tried in in 3 seperate pc's now and no video at post whatsoever

rma time...

Gbrnole:

Are you SURE it's your video card? I had the exact same experience with my Gigabyte motherboard and Gigabyte 6800GT UNTIL I updated the BIOS on the motherboard to the latest level. Now your situation maybe different, but you may want to consider looking into that before you conclude the video card is the culprit. Just so you know, until I updated the BIOS on the motherboard, I could only get the system to work with 1 bank of ram populated. Just a thought

-Dan

[mlbdude]

it looked maybe 10 to 15% better than what i have right now but the real factor was the image being darn close to being the same w/out ffdshow and dxva enabled with .00.67

This also has me wondering. Technically other that getting rid of the tearing or stuttering in software mode the decoders/video card output should be identical between all cards. You sure it was just not the jump to good 1080i output that made this difference?

[GbrNole]

do the 6600 and 6800 not perform vpp in hardware?

no the image really was better. if i had it to do over again i'd wait for the non gt 6600 version.

i thought the bios might be a culprit but i got the same result on 3 mobo's. even if the bios was to blame the card should at least show the start sequence before any drivers have a chance to kick in, no?

as i said the card was working as it should for a brief time and then never really gave me a chance to get it going again.

i can try it in a couple more pc's but i suppose you have to draw the line somewhere?

just to clarify though your 6800 never showed any video at all from the moment you turned the pc on? or ot just couldn't get to windows?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GbrNole

do the 6600 and 6800 not perform vpp in hardware?

They both do the VPP in hardware.

[korben_dallas]

The 6600 GT AGP & PCI Express and 6800 Vanilla PCI Express have full-function hardware processing: MPEG-2, WMV, and future formats.

The 6800 vanilla AGP, 6800 GT (all), and 6800 Ultra (all) have limited hardware processing: MPEG-2 only.

[stanger89]

Just to clarify, the the only thing broken on the 6800s (save the PCIe 6800) is HD WMV accelleration, all the MPEG 2 features are fully functional.

[GbrNole]

i posted the vpp question mostly to clarify the statement that was made above about vpp being software.

still not having any luck getting it going though

[hchucky]

Where can I find a copy of mediator? I can't seem to get nstant media working on my PC at the moment.

thanks,
HC

[hchucky]

Originally Posted by hchucky

Where can I find a copy of mediator? I can't seem to get nstant media working on my PC at the moment.

thanks,
HC

***Update***

Is this what everyone is using: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...hreadid=471346

[kny3twalker]

yeah and
I found something today
increase the priority of SageTV and VMR9 plays much smoother

[GbrNole]

kny - i'm pretty sure how to do this but could you detail it exactly? i've tried something similar in the past without much luck.

[mlbdude]

New roundup of 6600GT cards. Looks like the MSI card is the one for HTPC's. Anyone have one that works before I try?

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...t_agp_roundup/