Best Vid Card For DVD

[Scope87]

Hi... i like to watch a lot of DVD's on my pc... and i was wondering what a good vid card would be for this purpose... i am not into gaming soo i don't need gaming performance i just want a card that can handle my dvd's thanks!

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

How does your 9200 hold out? If it is fine at the moment I doubt upgrading will yield much inprovement, I've gone from onboard to a TNT2, to a Geforce 4, to a 9800 Pro, and the only real difference was from onboard, although the TNT2 was slightly jerky, sometimes. If not you could look for maybe a 9600, although I don't think you will need that power. What is the specs of the current card?

Edit: You can get a 9550 for $70 dollars, the cheapest DX9 card, although you are not into gaming. Either that or a 9600, no point of a 9800, although I don't really see what's wrong with what you have got.

[discodanman45]

If you have a 9200, that should give you good quality. More important things you should look at are monitor quality and in my opinion the most important thing is the software you use to play DVD's.

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

On the lines of software, if you have an old OEM copy of Powerdvd lying around, I reccomend you upgrade it to version 5, I did that with my new soundcard, and monitor, and even with the old monitor, the picture seems to look better, and it just sounds amazing. (I got the deluxe edition by the way).

[Scope87]

well i have the 64mb version of the 9200... it is a bit jerky at times with some bottlenecks... it just gets annoying only happens about once or twice a movie though... oh and by the way i've got powerDVD that came with my dvd player

[RJ]

Is DMA enabled for the DVD-ROM ? What's your IDE setup ?

RJ

[Scope87]

DMA?? what is that.... and i am not sure what you mean by IDE setup but i have 2 hard drives on one ribbon ... and one optical (dvd) drive on my other ide (not sure if thats waht you were asking though

[MrAustin]

Message removed due to posting in wrong Topic. Sorry :)

[RJ]

i have 2 hard drives on one ribbon ... and one optical (dvd) drive on my other ide

Yep that's what I wanted to know. Just to be sure you didn't connect an optical and a hard drive toegether. So your setup it good.

DMA?? what is that

Direct Memory Access. With DMA the CPU isn't involved much in the data transfer stuff, so it helps alot to improve performance. Your jerkiness could be caused by not having enabled the DMA mode.
Windows XP enables it automatically, but well, sometimes it gets disabled for some reason.
To check, and enable, the DMA setting, go into the device manager, click on the "+" next to IDE Controller. There double click on the secondary ide (that's where the dvd-rom is connected to, right ?), then you will see what mode is being used. Set it to "DMA, if available".

RJ