RE: Jon Whiten's MCE 2005 Box

["Jon Whiten" <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd be interested how you get on if you choose the FX5200 card as that is
what I was going to fit.  I needed to see exactly what the motherboard
provided before getting the card when it came and purchased the card from a
local shop (for local people - there's nothing for you here!) and they only
had the ATI at the lower price point.

I would still like to integrate the home automation into MCE but have found
nothing except the homeseer plug-in so far.  I am not against homeseer in
itself - just using xPLHal at the moment.

Regards

Jon Whiten
http://www.whiten.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: James Hoye [mailto:yahoo@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 10:50 AM
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Jon Whiten's MCE 2005 Box


> ATI Radeon 9250 with TV out.  The Motherboard has a 9250 onboard, but
> only VGA out.  The card I fitted has Svideo (for use with current TV)
> and DVI for use with a plasma when I finally get around to committing
> to a purchase!  I chose the lower-specced card as it is passively
> cooled (no fan).

This is the bit that's bugging me.  I'm not into graphics cards, and am
finding it a minefield.  I don't need the super-duper, whizz-bang, x
billions of triangles per nano-second capability for playing games - just
something so that I can drive my new LCD TV at its native resolution of
1368x768 [DVI connection] for playing back DVDs, MPEG4, WMV-HD [in future]
and Freeview via a DVB card.  DirectX 9 seems to be a requirement for MCE
2005.

Stability is a major issue as I really can't have the TV crashing every
day/few days as this is unlikely to impress SWMBO, especially since she's
been so good in allowing me to go this route in the first place.  Passively
cooled of course would be a bonus.

Currently a Sapphire Radeon 9800
http://www.ebuyer.com/qf.html?id=79271
and a GeForce FX5200
http://www.ebuyer.com/qf.html?id=54890
are two that I've plucked out of the
air as a starting point.

James H