Re: Upgrade ATI Video Card on MCE 2004--Please Help

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From: Peter Near [MCE MVP] (peter_at_thenears.com)
Date: 11/09/04 

Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 11:59:15 -0500

When we're talking about picture quality, it's important to understand
the device you're going to be viewing on.

Is it a television, CRT monitor, LCD monitor, High-definition
television? The answer will depend on that.

Generally, I would guess that the AIW card does not encode video as well
as a hardware-based encoder such as the Hauppauge 150, 250MCE, or 500.
If your ultimate goal is to go to MCE 2005, I might recommend the
Hauppauge 500 card with dual tuners - this will probably improve your
recorded tv quality quite a bit.

I would expect to hear something from ATI in the upcoming months about a
new All-in-wonder card that will support MCE 2005 with hardware encoding
and some extra video processing capabilities. Personally, I'd wait for
that if I were you and swap out the entire card.

As for video output, I'd recommend the following (assuming you don't
want to wait for the new AIW card):

To a Standard television - get a Media Center Extender
To a high-def television - get a card with outputs that match your TV
To a CRT monitor - get a good ATI or Nvidia card
To an LCD monitor - get a good ATI or Nvidia card that supports the
native LCD resolution.

Cheers,
Pete

Alinds wrote:
> I asked ATI Support This Question, and they were lost!
>
> I want to try
> and improve my current system. I have a dell 8300 with a ATI All in Wonder
> Radeon 9000 Low video card. Though this is not bad, I was wondering if I
> would get better picture quality by upgrading this card.
>
> Does anyone know what I could use in my system to accomplish this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Al
>

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