[soder]

No offense but this has been discussed so many damn times now. 8400gs will do VC1 in hardware, but its got a hardware bug. Steer clear.

9400 does 'partial' VC1 acceleration, which in plain English means that on my 5050e running 1080p24 source loads the CPU to 5%/15% per core, its fine.

Killa works fine, it would seem you read the first 3 pages of the nvnews.net mplayer thread and then got bored.

Finally, in one post you ask about the 8400GS for $40 and then complainn about the price of the 9000 series, they're punch for punch almost identically priced.

Just get a 9400 or 9500 with 512MB, its really that simple.

OK. Thanks for the info.
Any differense for hw-decoding in 9400 and 9500?

512MB you say. I guess then 256MB is not good enough, but what about 1 GB. Any benefits?

/Söder

[carvegio]

I think 256mb would also be good, but I think motd2k was saying what he thinks the best bang for your buck card would be.

[soder]

I think 256mb would also be good, but I think motd2k was saying what he thinks the best bang for your buck card would be.

OK, but 9400 or 9500 then? Are some card better then other in the hw-decoding thing? I will never play any games on the card, so it will only be an HTPC-graphic card

http://www.palit.biz/main/vgapro.php?id=733
or
http://www.palit.biz/main/vgapro.php?id=994

/Söder

[Pvt_Ryan]

Is there any reason *not* to get a 9400gt 1Gb and if not are there any benefits to having it over the 512mb version?

[soder]

Is there any reason *not* to get a 9400gt 1Gb ?

Was that meant for me?

10 dollars diff for me! 9400 or 9500. Worth it?

/Söder

[Pvt_Ryan]

No that was a general query.

For me there is little/no price difference between the 9400gt 512 and 1024.. I just wanted to make sure there were no known issues in terms of the hardware.

In terms of 9400/9500, I think the lower clock speed and therefore lower cooling / power requirements is better so the 9400 would be my choice. For me the most important feature of the card is the passive cooling.

[soder]

No that was a general query.

For me there is little/no price difference between the 9400gt 512 and 1024.. I just wanted to make sure there were no known issues in terms of the hardware.

In terms of 9400/9500, I think the lower clock speed and therefore lower cooling / power requirements is better so the 9400 would be my choice. For me the most important feature of the card is the passive cooling.

GPU Core Clock 550 MHz on both cards.
Memory speed 700 MHz vs. 800 MHz.

I took the 9400.

/Söder

[Jaco2k]

GPU Core Clock 550 MHz on both cards.
Memory speed 700 MHz vs. 800 MHz.

I took the 9400.

/Söder

9400 passive here too (512mb) but I can safely say it does run hot on a small HTPC box... it is by far the hottest component on my PC, usually hoovering around 82C.

[soder]

9400 passive here too (512mb) but I can safely say it does run hot on a small HTPC box... it is by far the hottest component on my PC, usually hoovering around 82C.

Mine not that small. I got an passive 8800 GT in my gaming PC, and that works. Got some fans to running 7V.

/Söder

[Pvt_Ryan]

9400 passive here too (512mb) but I can safely say it does run hot on a small HTPC box... it is by far the hottest component on my PC, usually hoovering around 82C.

What cooling do you have in your box? or is it completely passive?

[BLKMGK]

I think 256mb would also be good, but I think motd2k was saying what he thinks the best bang for your buck card would be.

No, he was saying 512mb. This has been discussed at length in the VDPAU thread. 256mb can be made to work with hacks and other ugliness but it wasn't the way to go, you wouldn't be able to play as much content and different encodings could trip you up. Get 512mb so that VDPAU can be run properly. For the price difference why hesitate?

9x IGP here and no issues I'm aware of. There have been heat concerns with this board expressed by at least one really vocal guy on the AVS forum but since I'm using an Intel style CPU cooler I'm not sweating it. I had an 8x PCIe passive in my previous config and can confirm it got hot but it never gave me issues or crashed because of it. <shrug> Even a small amount of airflow would greatly help a passive card keep cool...

[User 34959]

I took expert's advice and ordered MSI's passively cooled 9400 gt. Being a complete linux newbie i propably can't get it up and running but we'll see :p

[PainToad]

According to wikipedia, 9400 and 9500 both consume the same amount of watts, does that sound right?

I'm very short on power on my Dell POS power-supply is why I'm wondering.

[Jaco2k]

What cooling do you have in your box? or is it completely passive?

Zalman cooler on the CPU, Nexus PSU with silent fan (totally irrelevant for the box because the fan is pointing up and out of the box), 2 Noctua chassis fans - these are on the opposite side of the box to the GPU... they are mostly keeping the HD cool.

I might invest in a box with better airflow one of these days...

[fasteddy]

The latest nvidia beta may help IGP users unable to dedicate 512mb ram.

On systems using integrated graphics, VDPAU now uses system RAM instead of video RAM for many purposes. This should prevent "out of resources" problems in most cases, even when the video RAM carve-out is configured as low as 128M.