Best video card for me

[Sam Lowry]

I am interested on using this video card as a way of connecting to my TV using the HDMI cable, but also the best performance on all games. Is it worthed these days?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130337

Would you point that card the best cost/benefit these days? If I understand correctly it uses two DVI port and one of them you might use the DVI/VGA adapter along with a CRT monitor. The second should be the DVI/HDMI adapter to connect the HDMI cable.

What about that "HDTV cable", what means?

One thing I don't understand is why many video cards have S-Video instead of component-Video connectors. Since they don't have composite to justify their price (providing you plenty of connections to your different TVs), why S-Video instead of CVI?

And what should I do, to connect more than one TV to a single HDMI cable? My idea was to use my PC to transmit High-Definition videos from my Hard Drive to my TV, so I won't need a Blu-Ray player connected to the same TV, only the discs (I already have a Blu-Ray drive, and I can rip my movies to my HDD). So I will use Media Player Classic for that job.

 

[shadowduck]

If you want to push video to multiple TVs in your house you can do this with a product called an Extender and Windows XP MCE or Vista Home Prem/Ultimate. That will let you wirelessly push video out to up to 4 different TVs.

To answer your questions: All current cards have 2 DVI ports instead of 1 DVI 1 analog. All video card come with an adapter which allows you plug an analog monitor into the video card.

8800GT G92 is one of the best video cards on the market. Period. Its a great buy and I highly recommend it. Video cards have S-Video because they only deal with video and not sound. Component deals with both. You can buy TV cards and USB devices which add composite connectors to your PC. But thats an entirely different topic.

HDMI is 1 TV per cable. See above for ideas on using more than 1.

 

[madaniel]

I believe there may be DVI to HDMI adapters as well, yet I am not sure how well they work.

 

[Sam Lowry]

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8800GT G92 is one of the best video cards on the market. Period. Its a great buy and I highly recommend it.
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Wait, are you talking about the 8800 GT or 8800 GTS? I believe they are different video cards.

One day I have researched the video cards and I believe I saw a benchmark from Tom's Hardware saying that the 8800 GTS 512 MB was the best video card these days. But I am not sure about the new 9800 GTX, if it's worth the risk. I guess some people were complaining about it, not sure if was about the power consumption or some other issue.

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Video cards have S-Video because they only deal with video and not sound. Component deals with both.
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Hmm, that's interesting. But assuming the second DVI port is used with one adapter DVI/HDMI, and knowing that HDMI cables have video/audio on the same cable, I didn't realize that. But if we need to divide the audio or send the only audio signal from the 8800 GTS, we need to connect another cable on the sound card from the mobo, right?

Windows XP Media Center? I will see what they can do, but I thought this was managed by the software provided by your video card. I guess ATI has one on my currently Radeon 9500 card. It's called CATALYST Control Center.

Guys, the whole purpose of the second DVI port is to connect one HDMI cable to your TV.

HDMI >>>>>>> Component video >>>> S-Video.

I guess most people don't use the component connection, perhaps that's another reason for them to not include on most video cards. I believe some rare video cards have CVI.

 

[shadowduck]

8800GTS G92. It was typo.

The CCC is the standard software for controlling ATI video cards. It does NOT allow you wireless steam video to TVs. For that feature, you need a media center OS (for the interface) and an extender (to send the video).

Some new video cards actually have a dedicated HDMI port, but yeah you are right it does carry sound too, so I am not sure how that works exactly.