Replacing parhelia, but with what?

[bofr123]

Hi all.
Since my parhelia simply refuses to work correctly with my
new motherboard (Asus K8V (amd 64)), I now have to buy a new graphics card.
The new card must be capable of the following.

*Perfectly working overlay, even with HDTV-sized mpeg2 (This is the reason why i must replace the parhelia)
*Dualhead (at least)
*A clone of DVDMax that actually work
*The card should preferably be capable of doing Mon+Mon+TV at the same time, or at least be able to easily switch between TV & Mon at the secondary output.
*Very good image quality, my main monitor will be running at 1920x1440 so this is important.

What the card doesnt need, is to be able to run Doom3 at 100fps.
I hardly ever have time to game so as long as the card got better 3D than the parhelia i will be happy.

Thankful for any help/advice you might have.

/BOFR

[PAugustin]

Hello,

You can rule out Ati as they have no DVDmax type feature or none that works. I tried this summer in a new rig and you actually need a new video player to trick this and the TV out is simply horrible (at least compared to Parhelia or G400).

I have no idea about HDTV...

To have mon+mon+tv you will need 2 craphic cards if you go away from Parhelia/P750

You can find good IQ but none that really rivals Matrox.

Haven't you found any solutions to your issues ??? Maybe some people can help you ?
Edit: you can ask in the new HTPC / HiFi forum

[Greebe]

Could also ask on Matrox's forums, perhaps Haig and friends have some insight they would share

[Maggi]

Hi bofr,

I run a Parhelia 8x on a Tyan Thunder K8W, without any issues ...

what exactly are your problems ?

[bofr123]

There is something really fishy going on with the hardware overlay.

Simply put, when playing divx on my new flashy amd64-3000+
the process will use about the same percentage of the processor as when i used my old XP1800 ;\

I've reinstalled windows, changed between different versions of windows, upgraded bios(vga and motherboard), tried an enourmous amount of different drivers for everything in the computer, tried a large combination of drivers for everything in the computer, uninstalled / disabled every device inte the computer that i could,
and so on.....

Fresh install with parhelia & k8v & amd64-3000+= no overlay, no matter what i do.
(windvd playing 1080i @ 100% processorload and extremely choppy)

Fresh install with parhelia & xp1800 = perfect overlay
(windvd playing 1080i @ 60% processorload)


I have given up now, the parhelia and asus k8v simply does not work together.

/bofr

[Maggi]

sorry to hear about your trouble !

maybe it's a chipset issue, since my system uses the ones from AMD and I think yours is runnign on VIA, right ?

afaik, did VIA just release an update of their 4in1s, maybe it's worth a try before swapping hardware ?

also, do you have .NET v1.1 installed ?
what DirectX version ?
do you use hardware motion compensation on Parhelia ?

don't give up just yet ...

[bofr123]

Tried via 4-in-1 4.51->4.53 (newest)
Directx 8->9.0c
.Net 1.0 +the different service packs and 1.1

Motion comp on & off in drivers
Motion comp on & off in windvd

Basicly i have tried everything i could possibly think of.

I'm off the store now with a list of requirements for my new graphics card, I'll let them sort it out...


/bofr

[Maggi]

obviously, you've already been there and done that ...

did you already report to Matrox' own tech support forum ?

[MP]

Originally posted by PAugustin
You can rule out Ati as they have no DVDmax type feature or none that works.

I would have to disagree on this one. I had a G400 MAX before and I think that Ati's Theater Mode on my 8500LE is very similar to DVDMax i.e. running video on a window on the primary display produces full screen video on the TV. Can't say much about the TV-out quality though, as I'm currently limited to composite out.

Mikko

[leech]

I could try my 6800 GT with Monitor+monitor+TV (I have dual-head set up already). Not sure on the quality of it, and I haven't been able to find a DVDMax feature, anyone know of one? Other than that, I like the card quite a lot, though the image isn't quite as crisp as the Parhelia's...

Leech

[CaineTanathos]

leech, which brand is your 6800GT from?

Me, Keyfront and a couple of other guys
are looking for one.

currently we are thinking of buying a Leadtek 6800GT

[KeiFront]

I believe Leech got an eVGA 6800 GT IIRC. Admiral was planning to buy a leadtek, hows the card Admiral?

[bofr123]

I bought a radeon 9600xt two days ago (with the assurance from the seller that i could return it if I wasn't happy).

The card is actually not completely worthless.

IQ seems quite ok, maybe not as crisp as the parhelia but acceptable.

The tv-out works and the quality is quite good. The "theather" mode works pretty much the same way that dvdmax does, although you need to have clone mode active before it will work.
The program that controls this is very very stupid. For some insane reason it cuts about 10px from the bottom of every movie, I don't think their scaling-system works very well. This can also be seen if you view a movie thats bigger than normal pal-res (like hdtv), the software can't scale downwards in a way that makes the output look even remotely correct.

Then theres the problem of using more than one display. The card can only drive two screens at once, tv + mon or mon+mon, actually that is not entirely true, it can also drive mon+digital flat panel + tv. Switching between mon+tv and mon+mon is quite easy, simply push a few buttons.
Still, there are to many limitations to this so i will be getting a g450 pci (or something like it) to drive my two other monitors.


Thats all for now...back when i know more.

/bofr

[Greebe]

thx for the update

[leech]

Yeah, I bought the eVGA one, which is quite overclockable. With stock cooling, I easily got it to go at Ultra speeds. Problem is, as it now stands, if I only over clock the card, I gain NO performance... because my 3.06ghz CPU is too SLOW! To gain performance I have to overclock both of them.

But that's ok, I'm thinking sometime in December on going the AMD64 route.

Would really like to know how those Leadtek ones are. I was about to buy one of those, but couldn't find them anywhere, and then also read that the heat sink still takes too slots.... and since I move my computer quite frequently to go to LANs, then I didn't want an extra heavy card in my PC (I already have one of those huge copper heatsinks).

Leech