Is the 8500gt the best card for watching movies/ encoding?

Which one is better? Movies and encoding...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

I got an 8500 gt and I got to tell you it plays movies superbly. I'm waiting on my new quad until I encode my DV videos to DvD so I can't answer that question. Most games play very nicely also. "Not Crysis", but Call of Duty 4 is sweet.

the 2600XT is hands downthe best decoder here in both XP and Vista. I believe THG even did a review of these features and included all the low from 2600XT to the 2400XT/PRO and the 8600GTS to the 8400GS.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/06/08/avivo_vs_purevid...

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/26/avivo_hd_vs_pure...

Check those out, specially the last one.

I had a 2600pro(just got a 3870 today) and it was great for watching movies, didn't do much encoding though. The built in audio for the hdmi was a great feature imo.

Video cards has no impact on encoding, it is CPU bound.

Yes, ATI did release AVIVO a few years ago, but video encoding was done thru Catalyst's proprietary encoding program which merely hints at the potential. That encoding program was very, very limited.

I can't seem to find the review, but the 8600GT and HD2600 generally outperforms their younger siblings in HD decoding. That means lower demand on the CPU.