On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 6:00 AM, Tony Houghton h@realh.co.uk wrote:
I also/mainly mean more economical in power consumption and ease of installation and cooling. Most cheap GT220s have fans (most likely cheap & noisy ones) so I wouldn't want one of them in my HTPC. A fanless one might overheat being packed in closely with my DVB cards. But many motherboards already have integrated NVidia chipsets with HDMI, including audio, and basic VDPAU functionality. Mine is an 8200 and I know there's also been a lot of interest in Ion systems for HTPCs, so I think finding some way of getting these systems to display 1080i nicely should be a good move.
It's a bad assumption to say lesser expensive gt220 cards have cheap and noisy fans. It's simply not true. It's funny you mention ion as well. I have both ion and ion2 systems as well. One I'm using as a full time htpc, the other is a test box at the moment. And they do 1080i just fine. The ion1 box can't do temporal-spatial on 1080i but it does temporal just fine. I'm very satisfies with the very low power and no noise from the ion's.
Maybe a better idea is to not assume anything at all, but rather actually look up real life data or just buy one and see for yourself (as I did). There's no reason to take guesses about any of this stuff, plenty of users have posts their results and specs at various forums. A good place to start would be nvnews.net and read the thread "VDPAU testing tool".
Cheers