Suggest a graphics card please and a few other questions.

[ddave_73]

I have just been given by my brother an Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard and a Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 Socket 775 2.4GHz (800MHz) L2 2MB Cache chip and a GB of DDR2 4200.

I have to buy a new PCI-E graphics card and can only spend about £50 (xmas and 3 kids = not much spare cash ;) )..

What I want to do is be able to use this pc as a media centre mainly, are the components I listed above going to be able to play 1080p stuff like bluray and x264 movies @ 1080p ?

I will be using one of my oldish 7200 rpm IDE hard drives and of course a graphics card that will hopefully be within my budget and be able to handle 1080p video.

I will be running vista ultimate 64 as I really don't want to stay with xp now, my time with xp has passed and its time to move on :) (vista will run ok right ?)

Can I please get some advice and hopefully a suggestion as to what graphics card I should buy ?

Many many thanks in advance :)

[afx5i]

I have just been given by my brother an Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard and a Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 Socket 775 2.4GHz (800MHz) L2 2MB Cache chip and a GB of DDR2 4200.

Hi, Ddave_73. Since you've mentioned you would like to use Vista, I would say you better get at least 2GB or more memories, especially when you're building a Media Center PC. I have a Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with 1GB of RAM using 690G at home. I can tell you that the experience is just HORRIBLE. The machine keeps on using the hard drive to swap off unused data from main memory, and the OS seems so sluggish when compared to the days I was still using XP.

In my opinion, the Radeon HD 3xxx series might be a good choice for your machine. The reason is these cards have a feature called UVD, which allows hardware acceleration to be used on playing many of the video formats. Although I don't know how much do they cost in the UK, I suppose the lower end ones will fit your budget. Dig around the web and see if you can get a Christmas deal. I wish you good luck. :)