Cheap graphics card for a media center PC

so i traded some hardware teh other day, and got an asus m2n68 board that i started building a media center pc with. now my idea was to use xbmc and mythtv. now as it turns out, mythtv is a little more involved to setup than i expected, i haven't even managed to get my tv tuner working yet, so thats one issue
the other thing, the main thing anyhow, is it turns out the xbmc performance is terrible with the nouveau driver, so i'm thinking about getting a cheap radeon 4350 since as far as i know, they'll do audio over hdmi so i can run a single cable from the box to my tv. my question here now is if anyone has any experience with the radeonhd drivers and these cards, even maybe with xbmc? i just don't want to go out and spend the money to find out it doesn't work any better than what i had performance wise. really just want to know if the radeonhd drivers are working 100% with the 4350 or not

yes, absolutely, for standard playback, the integrated chipset was good. the problem was XBMC doesn't seem to work well with the nouveau driver, even trying to browse menu's was super choppy, took like 10-20 seconds everytime you press down in a menu for example to see the selection change. i could have used nvidia's binary driver, but i've been using nouveau for so long now, and it actually makes my system feel like it has a quad core which the nvidia didn't at the time, maybe nvidia's drivers have improved since then? but at the same time, i'm glad i got the radeon, the XBMC performance is great, and the HDMI hookup for the tv is convienient as well. Also using the vga input on my TV, i kept having to adjust the screen position because its constant autoscan everytime the resolution changed did not get it right, with the hdmi its lined up perfect without having to mess with it. so i think the 50$ for the card and an hdmi cable was worth it
Last edited by ssl6 (2010-08-17 15:18:34)

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