The time has come...

[dave m]

Over the last year or so I've built a home theatre machine, and we've rebuilt Jackie's machine, both with Kyro ll cards.

But I've always stayed loyal to matrox in my own machine.

Tonight I tried to play the latest Two Towers clip on my own machine, a trusty Athlon 350 with Marvel G200 and I now have to admit it's a tad slow. Well, so slow it was unwatchable. So now my machine is about to be relegated to office/grunt work. Still with its Matrox card of course, but I can't help but feel an era just past...

To misquote:

I must diminish and fade into the west...

Well I'll stay here, but less Matrox onboard for now.

Dave

[Ribbit]

I doubt that the video card was to blame for the slowness.

An Athlon 350? I thought they started at 500MHz?

[KvHagedorn]

lol yeah I was wondering about that too..

[dave m]

oops, my mistake, it's a Duron

[Nowhere]

???

the slowest Duron was Duron 600...

[Pace|Work]

K6-2 perhaps then?

[dave m]

Yep, that's the baby, don't I feel foolish

Dave

[SpiralDragon]

i thought the time had come for me too but then i changed my mind.... well actualy the wife did that

[KRSESQ]

Matrox offered as an add-on, a DVD module for the G200. I presume it offered some hardware accelleration for DVD playback. Don't know how well (or even IF) it worked, as I never had an opportunity to test it. Good luck finding one these days.

I'm using my G200 with a 1200 Athlon in a home theater system, and it works great except for some movies being a little jerky. Nothing really unwatchable, though.

Kevin

[Nowhere]

jerky?
On my Duron 600 I was able to watch everything perfectly (as long as I didn't maxed out the quality settings for example in divx options...). Now, on AthlonXP1700 I watch everything with every possible quality option maxed out and cpu usage is usually ~40%, sometimes 50 maybe...

So imo it's a little strange that on not-so-much-slover cpu playback is not always perfect...

[Fat Tone]

In my experience a K6-III wasn't really enough until they got to 450MHz. The £30 plug-in DVD card were a perfect companion to the G200 for DVD playback.

Is Mr P out of the question then Dave?

[Ribbit]

My sister's got a K6-III/400 and a G200, and DVDs sometimes get a little jerky, but still perfectly watchable. IMO, it probably wouldn't have any problems at all if DVDs weren't encrypted

[Nowhere]

It's hardware, not software encryption afaik

[UtwigMU]

I heard that K6 sucks compared to PII/PIII regarding DVD.

So either get DVD adon for G200 or IIRC some Ati cards decode DVD in hardware build more powerful machine - Athlon or PIII above 500 should cut it.

[dave m]

DVDs fine in Creative hardware, the whole machine is just getting long in the tooth and needs retiring to a less gaming scenario, it will be fine in the study. I'll just have to piggyback off the other machines we have.
As for Mr P, Tony,
can anyone say nuchal translucency screening :-)

Dave, somewhat surprised, pleased, gobsmacked and already feeling poor. ;-)