[cgraham]

This is my first post here; I'm new to XBMC as of last week. I built my rig with the plans to just run XBMC LIVE and not Windows XBMC, but I couldn't get the wifi card to work (totally new to linux though). Anyway, I've been reading about video cards and found that a lot of people reccomend the Nvidia GeForce GT220, with the caveat that the audio doesn't work/doesn't work well. All of the threads I have read on the issue seem to be for linux though, so i was wondering if the same issue is true with Windows? Also, will the card do an unmolested passthrough of audio to my reciever, so it can do the decoding?

Basically, I'm looking for suggestions for a video card with onboard audio over HDMI to watch HD movies.

My current hardware is:
ASUS P5G43T-M Pro LGA 775 Intel G43 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Celeron E3300 Wolfdale 2.5GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
Rosewill RNX-N300 IEEE 802.11b/g/n Wireless-N 2.0

Thanks for the help!

[nchall]

Have you made any decisions on a video card? Looking to do the same thing.

[cgraham]

I bit the bullet and bought the GT220. It should be here sometime this week. I'll update this thread once I get it.

[Hannes The Hun]

GT220 should do HDMI passthrough just fine with new XBMC DSplayer SVN builds, thanks to the ffdshow filter.
the problem with linux-based systems is that you have to manually update alsa to support newer nvidia cards.

[poofyhairguy]

The GT220 doesn't do HD audio bitstreaming because of hardware restrictions.

[cgraham]

So the GT220 showed up yesterday and I’ve only had enough time to plug it in and do the basic install. It works well; it does to audio over HDMI (which was my main concern) and it does improve the video playback. When I was running off of the motherboard, the video would get very pixeled in the shadows. The most annoying part was the pixels on the dark side of someones face. Now that is taken care of and it plays back just as well as my PS3 did (I had other issues with PS3 playback, which is why I went to XBMC). The only thing that seems odd, but I haven’t had time to look into, is that the CPU loading hasn’t really gone down that much. I’m still at about 50% on SD video and ~60% on 720p video. I may not have it quite setup yet (any ideas would be welcomed, to cut down on my troubleshooting).
All in all I am happy with the purchase – here is the one I bought: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.asp...6814134090

The only caveats to this model are that the fan makes it take up two spots on my MB (but barely) and the instruction manual is all the way useless. The English translation is terrible – and none of the things apply to this card anyway.

[Hannes The Hun]

did you install XBMX with windows or linux? which version, wihich guide?

[cgraham]

I installed XBMC with Windows XP, the latest one that is available from the XBMC page for Windows (Camelot).

[Mallet21]

If you want your GPU to control most of the video playback you will have to download and install the DSplayer version of XBMC:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=61355

FWIW...My GT220 works very well using DSplayer.

[cgraham]

If you want your GPU to control most of the video playback you will have to download and install the DSplayer version of XBMC:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=61355

FWIW...My GT220 works very well using DSplayer.

Great, thanks very much. I will try this out when I get some time!