[SOLVED] Video card for 4k?

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qwiksilvertrav

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Oct 16, 2012
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So finally making the jump to a 4k home theatre set up. Currently have a home theatre PC perfectly capable for 1080p movies but is not set up for 4k.

It's a small form factor case. These are parts of the setup I have so far.
-Has a 4th gen I5 processor. Should be good for 4k? I'll have to power on the PC again to see what model but I think it's a 45XX or 46XX I5.
-32GB Ram
-Network Drobo drive. Has 32TB storage as it sits right now with 1GB SSD fast cache

I'll be playing movies off of the Drobo. Drobo and HTPC are ethernet wired, no wireless.

HTPC will feed video to a Yamaha RX-V6A and then feeds to a Sony 4k A90J TV.

My biggest question is what low profile/small form factor card can supply great 4k and pass through Dolby Atmos/DTX etc? I will not be gaming on this as a I have a gaming rig already built for that.
Read some sources saying the ZOTAC Geforce GT 730 Zone Edition 4GB is a great, cheap small form factor card that can rock 4k. But then read other sources saying it gets pushed to it's limits and isn't enough.

Basically looking for super smooth 4k at 120hz and able to pass through all the latest sound and video codecs that will work on a 4th gen intel board.

Open to any advice or suggestions! Thanks!
 
Solution
GT730 is a terrible card for 4k HTPC use. It's only HDMI 1.4 which only allows 4k at 30Hz in full color, or 4k60 with lower quality Y'CbCr 4:2:0 subsampling (which the later drivers switch to automatically).

Worse, it is only "VDPAU Feature Set D" which means it can only partially hardware assist 4k H.264 only, so your poor CPU will have to do full software decoding of everything else, and even if it could do this its fan would get quite loud.

"E" in GTX 750Ti adds DCI, partial assist for 4k H.265. "F" in GTX 950-960 have full hardware decode of H.264, H.265 (Main and Main 10), DCI and VP9. Pascal GT1030 and GTX 1050+ "H" adds hardware decode of Main 12 H.265 too at up to 8k, but everything streaming appears to be changing over to...
Well now after testing it the Drobo 5n is completely incapable of being a Flex server. Just a spinning circle on my TV and other devices. No processing power! Not sure why they even have this as an option on a Drobo as it's completely useless! This was trying to stream 1080p content.
Turn off transcoding in settings.
Force videos to play at native resolution (without transcoding).