Video for TV

[mtalkington]

Can anyone suggest which PCI video card I should use for my Celeron 667mhz computer to hook up to my TV? I know I need a video card with a TV out, of course, but other than that, I'm not sure. (The TV has S-video and component video inputs, as well as composite, if that makes any difference.)

Thanks for the advice!

[Howard_Casto]

Well you really need a computer with an agp port for a new card, but if you still want one then ati is about the only company that makes pci versions of their. newer cards.  It is going to be rather crippled with the pci bus speed though.  Any ati is good, and sicne you machine is realitively old I personally would just get a nice mid-range card that I can get cheaply.  

[SNAAAKE]

x-pert 98 32 mb would do the trick and YES..of course it matters...the card must output s-video.othewise..you might just kill yourself with composite signal...OUCH !..composite signal hurt your eyes so bad.

[mtalkington]

Do you think I'd be OK with the ATI All-in-Wonder 128 with 16mb instead of the version with 32mb?

[Rahzel]

I have an ATI All-In-Wonder with S-video out and it looks very authentic to a real arcade monitor. The only thing is mine is 32 megs ram, but I'm sure how much of a difference it will make.

[Lilwolf]

All the ATI's use the same TV-out chips.  If you don't care about recording video, go for one of the others.

btw, they just came out with a new All-In-Wonder PCI card.  It's based on the 7500 so it will have passing 3d for some games.  And great TV-out.

I wouldn't go with any other brands other then Malox's.  Why?  I don't know any good NVidias with TV-out that is PCI.  You will be gambling there

[SNAAAKE]

well..i had to built a mame computer for one of my friend do i bought a 16 mb pci card(the MOBO didnt have agp) and i couldnt do hardware streatching so got a 32 mb card and that one did fill the whole screen.AND, that was the reason i told you to get 32 mb to begin with.just helpin

Just so you know,you could use 8mb agp card and do hardware stretching but you cant do that with 16mb pci card(i could be wrong but happend to be,only 32 pci card did hardware streatching ).

[Darkstalker]

Unless you plan on running 3D accel PC games, the memory shouldn't be an issue.  More memory on the card will just let you run a higher color depth at larger resolutions.  Since most standard TVs only support 640x480 or 800x600, you can get 32-bit color at 800x600 with 8MB of RAM on the card (My math might be off, but I think you only need 2MB to support 800x600x32).  Since most cards now come with 16MB as a minimum, just make sure the card supports S-Video output, and any hardware stretching features you want to see.
I would highly recommend ATI as the way to go, since Matrox, S3(3Dfx), and nVidia have always lagged behind them in TV output, and it's been a long time since 2D performance was measured on a video card.