Widescreen Gaming Forum

What's a few good HDMI cards to power a 50" Plasma TV by EVGA?

The TV is a Panasonic Viera TH-50PC77U;
http://www2.panasonic.com/consumer-electronics/support/Televisions/VIERA-Plasma-HDTVs/Technical-Specification/model.TH-50PC77U.T#ts

The TV is going to be mainly used for videos, a web cam and some gaming.

This isn't my TV, so let's not get into the discussion of Plasma TVs please, there's nothing I can do to change it, I just need to figure out which will be the best mid to high ranged card for HDMI to play very well on this 50" Plasma, that should also be a nice card for years to come for upgrading into other hardware down the road...

The first two to catch my eye, to start at the bottom were the Evga GeForce GTX 560 Ti FPB and Evga GeForce GTX 570 HD...

One last thing, does HDMI now work great in PC cards?

THANKS

P.S. I'm only interested in EVGA...

HDMI is pretty much just DVI with audio capabilities. To my knowledge televisions only have VGA or HDMI inputs, so HDMI is the only way to go if you require HDCP for Blu-ray movies or other digital media encrypted in such a fashion. One thing to keep in mind with plasma is that the response time is typically slow, but newer GPU cards lack analog outputs nowadays, too...

The GTX 560 is a very capable card, however similar AMD cards are cheaper and often outperform it in gaming. The GTX 570 is outmatched only by the GTX 580 when gaming on a single screen (AMD has nothing to compete with it), so if you have the money I would grab a GTX 570, with 1536MB of memory if you can find one. I think you can find a 570 for around $350, while the 580 starts around $470. If you really want something future-proof, look for a Palit or Gainward GTX 580 with 3GB of memory. These go for around $600, though, and are currently hard to find.

All references to denomination are in U.S. Dollars.

I recently hooked my HDMI to my LED television, and it worked right off the bat, though the color needed some tweaking.

If you're not going to play graphics-heavy games, most any cheap card will suffice. Any 4xx or 5xx card would be overkill. even a 250gts would be sufficient for play 1080p movies. Depending on your CPU, you could even get away with something cheaper. Though I'm not sure about HDMI version in those cards. That's something you may want to consider.

The thing is, this is a box for someone else that I'm doing this for and I forgot to mention this is on XP too...

I think I better get them to upgrade into Win7 for a card like this to take better advantage and compatibility of because with XP it's not going to be able to take advantage of higher end DX and Win7 seems easier to get it synced with external monitors too...

I'm a geek and a Tech, so this is why I'm doing this, but I have not been following the scene lately with the cards. For my sanity I want what will be the most pain free, between the 560 and 570 and of course if they are going to be just as smooth sailing between the two, then really if it's just the differences of the cards, well, how much better is the 570 over the 560?

Does the 570 really out shine the 560 or just by a few hairs?


THANKS

The 200-series nVidia cards do not have HDMI outputs, only HDMI 1.1 via a pass-through adapter attached to the DVI ports. The current revision of HDMI is 1.3. I'm not exactly sure about the differences, but I'm pretty sure bandwidth is limited for 1.1 and it only supports a refresh rate of 60Hz. I used such a setup to a DLP television on my 8800GTX and the display was not good: the screen was far off center and couldn't be adjusted, and there was visual noise on the screen.

The WDM model in Vista and above does make display connectivity a lot easier and better. XP is also ten years old now, so an upgrade is in order regardless, not to mention the fact it only supports DirectX 9.0c and is no longer a priority for Microsoft to update. I would go with Vista instead of 7, but that's just me...

The GTX 570 has a wider memory bus providing more bandwidth, which is important if you want to run games with higher levels of antialiasing. Apples-Apples, the GTX 570 is probably 15-20% faster. Real world gaming however is a lot closer, maybe 5-10%. Now that I think about it, the fact that you can find a GTX 560 with 2GB of memory makes it more appealing...

[H]ardOCP Reviews:
GeForce GTX 560 Ti GC
GeForce GTX 570

I decided to go with the 570HD with the FULL-HDMI;

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130621


THANKS

My personal experiences of HDMI outputs from graphics cards:

Windows 7: painless, easy.
Windows Vista: slightly more picky, still fairly easy.
Windows XP: absolute flamin' nightmare. Audio was intermittent, rebooting would require the system to reinstall the HDMI audio driver before it would work again. :(

Yeah, I'm going to put Win7 on this...

Actually I'm going to start more at the bottom with graphics and see how that goes, either a GT 240 or 430 or possibly something in the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series...

Someone mentioned this to me;

FYI The size of the TV doesn't matter. 1080P is 1080P no matter what size the TV might be. I ran my HTPC on my 65" plasma using a GT430 and it worked great. (high def TV, DVDs and BlueRay) Just make sure the TV has a bit for bit pixel mapping mode. On my Panasonic its THX mode, my Mitsubishi had adjustable horizontal and vertical size adjustments. If the TV doesn't have one or the other, Nvidia may not be the way to go. For some reason Nvidia's TV resolution modes have severe overscan issues, and the resize desktop option doesn't work. Currently using the built in Intel Sandy Bridge GPU to run in the HTPC and have had no issues.

It's not my TV so all I know are the specs listed here;
http://www2.panasonic.com/consumer-electronics/support/Televisions/VIERA-Plasma-HDTVs/Technical-Specification/model.TH-50PC77U.T#ts

Between the models I listed above, which might be easier to work with this TV for HDMI?

I don't have any experience with AMD cards on televisions, and all I can say of nVidia is my experience with a 4-year-old card on a DLP television. If the main purpose of the PC is to be a home theatre configuration, then you don't need to spend as much on the GPU. Concerning the GT 240, keep in mind what I said in my earlier post. The 200-series cards only have DVI outputs, and the pass-through quality to HDMI is not good in my experience. The 400-series cards do, however, have HDMI outputs. If the PC is going to be used occasionally for gaming then I would spend a little more on the GPU, because the budget-level cards often have less than half the gaming performance of the mid-level. If you are going to do some occasional gaming then I would recommend a GeForce GTX 460 or a Radeon HD 5770. The Radeon can be found for as little as $130, the GeForce for around $170.

Yeah, my experience of AMD/ATi cards on HDTVs via HDMI was painless. The same cannot be said for nVidia. :( When I got it working, it was fine. It was just getting it working that was the problem.