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Zotac Releases GeForce GT 520 With Classic PCI Connector
jones_supa writes "It turns out that you can still get a legacy PCI graphics card with a modern GPU. In this case it's a Nvidia Geforce GT 520 card provided by Zotac. Both the PCI and PCIe x1 variants feature a GT 520 graphics chip with 48 stream processors, 512MB of DDR3 memory, a 810MHz core clock speed, a 1333MHz memory speed, and a 64-bit memory interface."
PCI slots cap at 533 MB/s (and a lot are 133 or 266), which is less than a tenth of most PCIe x16 slots, so I can't imagine that you're going to be making the most of the hardware somehow.
There are a TON of older computers that people still run with PCI slots. They would work just fine repurposed as a HTPC but until now there was no hardware acceleration available. The XBMC Forums will have someone come along that is looking for the "Best" PCI option and usually that involves either an SVIDEO or VGA connector. Some new TVs will have a VGA but not all of them.
If the form factor is correct, then plenty of recent Xeon/Opteron servers, with a free PCI slot, suddenly become AWESOME desktop platforms. Around here, you can get late model 4-core Xeons, with maybe 8GB of RAM, on Craigslist, from name-brand companies [HP, Dell, etc], for circa $500. And they will be of VASTLY higher quality [with esp. vastly better motherboards] than the consumer-oriented junk that those same companies are peddling.
I'm hoping it's got a bog-standard PCI interface specification, so that the old PWS console firmware works with it. The PWS 600au works great with an ATI Radeon 9000, NetBSD + X11. Not so sure about the xorg support for the GT520 though. We'll see.
And what are you going to put this in, a PII? That won't help, the bottleneck is the processor (~400 MHz) or some other part of the ancient hardware.
Running VDPAU video card acceleration on a zbox my CPU varies a lot depending on content but it would seem a pentium 75 Might be able to act as a mythtv frontend with this card. I think something in your specified PII era would be far more than enough. Especially since in ye olden days when mythtv was new, a PII was a kinda decent frontend, and its not like TV has changed much since then.
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But carbs are still very useful. Is there really much use in having a modern GPU on a PCI card? For those occasional legacy systems there are plenty of PCI cards floating around for cheap. Heck, I've got a stash of old PCI cards I'd gladly give away.
I actually LIKE articles like this, as it gives me info on another option for my customers that are looking to upgrade to Win 7 but whose box doesn't have PCIe. I've found Windows 7 can run quite decently on a 2.2GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM but there are a hell of a lot of machines out there without PCIe and AGP cards are frankly crazy high now.
I just really wish someone would make some Radeon HD5xxx and 6xxx cards with AGP and make them sub $50 like they did for awhile with the HD2xxx and 3xxx cards. There are a lot of late model P4s that can easily and cheaply be upgraded to the Pentium D (I buy them all day long for less than $20 a chip) which works great even on MMOs like LOTRO and Perfect World but Windows 7 runs so much better and videos are so much smoother with a decent GPU for DXVA. With the economy still nasty having affordable options is always of the good in my book, So I like hearing about stuff like this and don't forget XP is still supported until 2014 so that is a hell of a lot of boxes out there that could run better with a GPU boost.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.