Quote:
Originally Posted by dragon
I know they're both pretty rubbish but I have the x1300 kicking around in my box of spares pulled from a dell and the 8400GS is around somewhere (pulled from housemates pc)
Which is the better card as I need a PCI-E video card to go in a machine it's going to spend most of the time displaying the windows desktop or eve-online/l4d
My Atom 330 manages that with a 2400HD but it lacks the grunt for some HD decoding and I just picked up a 2.1ghz Quad opteron server very cheap which can be easily adapted to work as a desktop (I'll probably replace my secondary desktop, a 1.6 p4 with the atom and use the "server" as me primary desktop)
|
"or eve-online/l4d" ?, no idea what that is , but you also say "with a 2400HD but it lacks the grunt for some HD decoding "
based on the assumption you might like to decode HD video quite regularly, then its seems pritty simple....
although i havent tryed one as yet, it appears the "8400 GS " is the lowest in the nvidia range that has the "VDPAU" hardware ASIC onboard, many people are apparently using that ASIC for AVC HW HD 720p and 1080i/p decoding with a multi threaded decoder like CoreAVC.
the ATI/AMD "x1300" while potentially can also HW decode if they ever get around to activating it in future drivers..., its not clear weather it has the ATI/AMD "UVD" HW decode equ of nvidia "VDPAU" HW decode onboard, so useing the "8400 GS " seems to be your better option right now.
while i do like the HD3xxx/4xxx and the potential for using ATI/AMD "UVD" ASIC, the simple fact is ,right now theres no documentation for it as yet, wereas the "VDPAU" ASIC is a known quantity, the developer docs are available and the 3rd partys are adding and improving "VDPAU" assisted HW decoding too open and closed apps right now.
as it stands now, it appears your "8400 GS /VDPAU" will be far better than your 2400HD inside the Atom 330 box were video playback is concerned.