Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid? (in USD): $45.00 | Rating: 8
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Kernel (uname -r):
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2.6.25-2-686
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Distribution:
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Debian Lenny (5.0)
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I got this card for a computer that is to be used as my MythTV frontend. The motherboard is an old Socket 370 unit with the i810 chipset, which lacks an AGP slot, so I had to get a PCI card. The card was much less expensive than other any-bit-near-modern PCI graphics cards and I had used NVIDIA 6200 cards in other builds (see the 6200TC PCIe review), so I decided to get the 6200. The 6200 is the most modern NVIDIA card available on the PCI bus, by the way. ATi does put more modern cards like the HD 2400 Pro on a PCI card, but those are significantly more expensive.
This card performs reasonably well, is passively cooled, and does not overheat. However, NVIDIA's drivers (tested with 173.14) are a bit funky when it comes to detecting TVs, such as the CRT I hooked up to the SVHS port. I was able to change the TV geometry and overscan to get a usable picture, but XvMC support is a bit spotty. Mplayer will use it if you tell it to use the ffmpeg12mc codec (-vc ffmpeg12mc) but MythTV apparently has trouble using XvMC as my CPU usage was much higher using XvMC than just using XVideo.
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