don't use purevideo on Vista

clipped from www.avsforum.com One other thing that I've learned recently after playing around with a variety of video decoders on vista is that the default MS decoder allows hardware acceleration. Under Vista, the decoder basically passes the video information off to the display driver which is responsible for things like deinterlacing, denoising, et cetera. In my personal experience, I've had the best results with the MS decoder. In fact, according to MS, when you use the PureVideo decoder on Vista, it's actually doing a software-only decode. Here's a couple of links to posts by an MS employee about this topic on thegreenbutton.com: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/pe...ead.aspx#199375 http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/pe...ead.aspx#174165

MSI 8500GT with HDMI

clipped from www.msicomputer.com NX8500GT-MTD256EH

Noise reduction between Nvidia and ATI

clipped from www.anandtech.com During the test, although noise is reduced using AMD hardware, it is not reduced to the level of expectation set by the visual explanation of the test. Based on this assessment, we feel that AMD noise reduction deserves a score of 15 out of 25. Silicon Optix explains a score of 15 as: "The level of noise is reduced somewhat and detail is preserved." In order to achieve a higher score, we expect the noise to be reduced to the point where we do not notice any "sparkling" effect in the background of the image at all. By contrast, with NVIDIA, setting the noise reduction slider anywhere between 51% and 75% gave us a higher degree of noise reduction than AMD with zero quality loss. At 75% and higher we noticed zero noise in the image with no detail loss until noise reduction was set very high. Tests done with the noise reduction slider at 100% show some detail loss, but there is no reason to crank it up that high unless your HD source is incredibly noisy (which will not likely be the case)

DVI HDMI cable

clipped from thegreenbutton.com There are 6 types of DVI.  DVI-A, DVI-D and DVI-I.  They come in single (up to 1080p) and Dual Link (over 1080p).  You need a dual link capable video card to use a larger than 1080p screen (common in the movie/broadcast industry as well as medical imaging systems).  Some of hte larger gaming screens are also over 1080p resolutions.  DVI-A is analog, pretty much identical to vga or component.  DVI-D is digital.   DVI-I can be either.  This is why video dvi-i is used on video cards.  It doesn't matter what the dvi type is on the other side of hte wire, it'll do all 3.   Now they do have different cables.  DVI-D cables have different pins then DVI-A.  DVI-I has both sets of pins but DVI-I Dual Link has even more pins.   I order dvi-i duallink cables to avoid the concern of what type of wire I need to have and prolong its life.

HD decoding

clipped from www.anandtech.com We are using PowerDVD Ultra 7.3 with patch 3104a applied. This patch fixed a lot of our issues with playback and brought PowerDVD up to the level we wanted and expected. We did, however, have difficulty disabling GPU acceleration with this version of PowerDVD, so we will be unable to present CPU only decoding numbers. From our previous experience though, only CPUs faster than an E6600 can guarantee smooth decoding in the absence of GPU acceleration. clipped from www.anandtech.com Remember that these are average CPU utilization figures. Neither the AMD nor the NVIDIA high end parts are able to handle decoding in conjunction with the old P4 part. Our NetBurst architecture hardware just does not have what it takes even with heavy assistance from the graphics subsystem and we often hit 100% CPU utilization without one of the GPUs that support bitstream decoding.

Processor Power Consumption

Prescott 560 3600MHz = 115W
C2D E6600 = 65W (up to E6800)
C2D Q6600 = 105W
AM2 3000MHz = 90 - 125W

Also, Athlon processor does not have SSE2 and SSE3, therefore, some hardware acceleration of h.264 may not work.

Wired and Wireless together

clipped from www.ezlan.net It is very common in today computers (especially Laptops) to have Wired Network Card (NIC) as well as Wireless.  Often users end up in a conflict and they do not know how to control the system. Windows Network configures each card has it own TCP/IP  and the two can live together in peace and harmony provided they are configuring to work with Set Priority. 1. In Control Panel, double-click Network Connections. 2. Right-click a network interfaces, and then click Properties. 3. Click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and then click Properties. 4. On the General tab, click Advanced. 5. To specify a metric, on the IP Settings tab click to clear the Automatic metric check box, and then enter the metric that you want in the Interface Metric field. Looks like this. http://www.ezlan.net/network/metrics.jpg

Gigabyte P35C-DS3R

clipped from techgage.com One of the most important features of any motherboard is overclocking ability, and this is where the P35C-DS3R falls a little short. After a long overclocking session, I found 450FSB to be the highest the board would possibly go before becoming unstable. Compare this to the P5K boards that hit 475FSB, and even that is not high by todays standards. This board currently retails for ~$175, which to me is a reasonable price, if you plan on using the boards features to their full potential. This would include the E-SATA port, which will be appreciated by those who require it. It's a little different than most E-SATA ports, since they include a cable for power. If you have an E-SATA enclosure, you won't need the power cable, but if you have a spare S-ATA drive lying around, you will be able to hook it up to your PC without opening your tower.