Best value in home theater video card

[NooBFrank]

Hi all and thanks in advance for your help, experiences and opinions.

I am looking for a video card for a new PC build as follows:

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: Now

PRICE RANGE: Under $100.

USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Home theater use - streaming videos, movies etc. Upto blu ray videos. Nothing terribly tricky.

CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: Onboard video from GIGABYTE GA-H61MA-D3V motherboard - which is truly what is supported by the i5-2310 installed. 400w power supply.

OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS: GIGABYTE GA-H61MA-D3V motherboard with 8GB DDR3 RAM.

Motherboard has 1 PCI Express x16 slot and 3 PCI Express x1 slots.

PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Newegg. USA

MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1920x1080,

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: It has been a while and video card technology has gone CRAZY!!. Anyway - I want an HDMI output with audio for ease of connection into my HD tv. I want to make sure I get this right since it seems that audio can get tricky.

Also - I dual boot Win7 and Linux (AV Linux which is based on Debian) so I would need the card to be Linux friendly.

Other questions -

So let's do this by numbers so you can answer by number:

1. What card would you recommend.

2. My motherboard manual says that the 1 pci express x 16 slot I have "conforms to PCI Express 3.0 standards - but you must install an Intel 22nm (Ivy Bridge) CPU." Okay - My cpu is Sandy Bridge... So does that mean it complies with?? 2.1?

3. Is CUDA Processors or Stream Processors the new measure of performance? What is the simple answer of how to compare.

Oh and - if the answer to Question 1 is - SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6670 from January's TomsHardware best card for the money article - that sounds great - just can someone triple check that this will do the sound and pci standards?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-2.html

Thanks a bunch in advance for the help.

Frank

 

[BeastLeeX]

1. Get a 7750: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161403

or a 7770: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127687

2. Your PCI slots are fine, you are currently on 2.0, not 3.0, because you have a Sandy Bridge CPU, but 2.0-3.0 is not a big deal right now.

3. CUDA is Nvidea's Graphics core, and a Stream Processor is AMD's. Don't judge a card by it's amount of cores, look at benchmarks.

Lastly if your power supply does not have a 6 pin GPU connector, you need to get the 7750, as the 7770 has one.

 

[NooBFrank]

Well - it is done. The new 7750 is installed and running perfectly. For kicks I setup two 1080 flat screens and ran extended desktop. Put two seperate hi-def videos on and watched them both for any signs of trouble. Nope - flawless.

Thanks for the help!

 

[BeastLeeX]

sweet, hopefully it serves as a good little chip for ya.