Simple question, need advice.

[Mr B]

If you had a chance to upgrade from a AIW7500, to a FX5200 Personal Cinema for short $ (really short), would you?

Is it worth the trouble, futzing with drivers, etc, if the image quality for TV capture is the same...IS the IQ the same? Better? Worse?

I don't have a remote for the AIW...the FX has, and the fancy schmancy breakout box thingie... If I wanted to get a remote for the AIW, I'd need to invest most of what I'd lay out for the FX....

Is the FX5200 (128MB ram) capable of playing UT2K4 @ 1024x768, at high (or close to) settings?

Just wondering if this might be worth looking at...

TIA!

B.

[12am]

Well, I feel that the upgrade might be a worthy one. Image quality might be the same or even slightly better however I doubt it will be a night and day affair. A remote is always a nice goody to have and if the price is small then why the heck not. Removing drivers is pretty darn simple actually, just remove all ati components through the add/remove progs app, then before restarting run drivercleaner 3 and have it clean out the rest of the ati files for you. Then simply reboot and install the nvidia drivers. As for gaming realistically I can tell you most games will be running 1024x768 medium/low settings or 800x600 medium high to get playable frames. Newer games like doom3 and hl2 might be difficult to get running smoothly at anything above 800x600 with low settings.

[Mr B]

Well, I feel that the upgrade might be a worthy one. Image quality might be the same or even slightly better however I doubt it will be a night and day affair. A remote is always a nice goody to have and if the price is small then why the heck not. Removing drivers is pretty darn simple actually, just remove all ati components through the add/remove progs app, then before restarting run drivercleaner 3 and have it clean out the rest of the ati files for you. Then simply reboot and install the nvidia drivers. As for gaming realistically I can tell you most games will be running 1024x768 medium/low settings or 800x600 medium high to get playable frames. Newer games like doom3 and hl2 might be difficult to get running smoothly at anything above 800x600 with low settings.

For D3 I've got the 9800XT gaming rig... I'm more thinking of the odd "feel like playing a round of Onslaught while logged onto this machine...too lazy to shut down and fire up the gaming rig" type of gaming...

You know...blow off some steam after deleting a bunch of dotdeals spam threads posted because some dunderhead can't read our rules...frag some bot for a few minutes, and the log back on here... :p

The AIW can't play UT2K4 at all...so even medium settings are better than I have now... :rolleyes: The AIW does play UT'99 fine, but I like running over bots with the truck... :cool:

[12am]

well if your not worried that much about iq and speed than yea by all means go for the 5200, at least it will play ut2k4, having 512+ of ram in that system will also go a fair ways to help performance if you don't have it already.

[Mr B]

well if your not worried that much about iq and speed than yea by all means go for the 5200, at least it will play ut2k4, having 512+ of ram in that system will also go a fair ways to help performance if you don't have it already.

Well, it'd be replacing the AIW in a dual AMD XP 1600+ (modded for SMP and multipliers, running as MP2000+'s) with 512MB ECC Registered PC2100.

I suppose the thing I am concerned with the most is, the image quality when recording TV shows to my HDD really. Playing UT is gravy. I know that a straight FX5200 can and will at least run UT2K4.

But, if the vid capture is worse than the AIW7500, it's not worth it.

[12am]

why not search for some reviews of it than?? I'm sure at least one of the reviews will touch on the vidcapture quality.

[Mr B]

BUMP?

Anymore thoughts, opinions, advice, comments, yada-yada....??

TIA! :santa:

Brian