AMD Radeon HD 6900, 6800, 6600 etc. Series Thread: Supporting HDMI 1.4a and BR 3D! - Page 3

i am looking forward to getting a 6850 for my main machine and putting my 5770 in my other machine currently using an onboard 4200.

i will be getting this one:



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-912-_-Product

will i see a big performance jump going from 128 bit to 256 bit?

i will be getting the card regardless as i need a better card for the second machine.

Hello all, I'm just looking for the best video card for watching movies only no gaming. Video is going to a 63 plasma and processing will be through a Anthem Pre-Amp. HDMI output is a definite must. Budget is not really an issue as I am more concerned on Video quality and passing audio through i.e. Blue Ray and DVD rips. The card can be current or coming out within the next month or two.

System is Windows Home server and hoping to upgrade to the new version once the new system is released.

Thank you.

You don't need anything near this powerful just for video playback. Are you running playback through the WHS machine, or is there a dedicated HTPC?

Your videos will play twice as fast. But wait, you didn't tell your CPU. If it's Atom 230 you won't see the difference.
There are review sites to find better info.

As for HTPC use. Just in case someone have read my earlier post I claimed that regular Sapphire 6850 is quiet. Just as quiet as HT4U tells here
http://translate.google.com/translat...%2Findex27.php
"The Sapphire HD 6850 implementation is currently in the top in our measurements of noise"

What gammite mentioned - Sapphire 6850 TOXIC is a different card and it's probably targeted to overclockers, not HTPC people so I'm not sure if it's quiet enough for living room environment.
I can tell that regular Sapphire 6850 can be made quieter than any soft mounted 5400RPM HDD in enclosure, i.e. almost silent. For blu-ray playback, at least. Gaming will spin up fan, of course.
This is the card that I was talking about http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102908

Also be aware that according to this guy - tima, this card makes so called "29/59 Hz bug" more pronounced
http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...526537#p526537
I think it is related to some 1080i TV broadcast programs in WMC and shows up more apparent on some TV models. It's probably described in this thread
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/8...px?PageIndex=1

I don't have that horrible experience like tima, but I think I have seen it on SNL on NBC. Like sometimes for a split a second it looks like few frames are missing in video. Like eventually (rare) for 1/4 of a second there are not 7.5 frames in 30fps video but only 2. I'm not sure. I really would not have noticed that if I didn't read those posts. It doesn't bother me, but FYI.
Only applicable to 1080i TV in WMC on some programs/stations. It's a matter of proper setting of interlacing flag by broadcaster as far as I understood.

I'm playing directly from the Server. My motherboard is a ASUS P5Q-E LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor.
Currently 16TB of storage.

Gammite,

A 5670 is slightly overpowered for a HTPC, so a 6850 would be horribly overpowered. The 5770 you currently have is more than enough for video playback.

Now, improvements still may be seen, since the 6xxx series has better video processing (from what I have read). But enough to notice? No idea.

I would wait for the 6700 series. Less power used, less heat, less noise, and more than enough power. I would suspect something to come out in the next few months.

And what's your current video card? Everything else has plenty of grunt for HTPC work. Just out of curiosity, how much mirroring are you doing out of that 16TB?

I think the bigger problem is that he is looking to use his server as an HTPC, which reallly WHS is not optimized for

Rumors are that 67xx will be rebranded 57xx
http://www.techpowerup.com/132459/AM...00-Series.html
There should be new low end Turks and Caicos GPUs in Q1 2011 though

The current video card is just a low end nvidia that I had lying around.

All of my data is mirrored and still have plenty of open slots in my case.

I have not streamed directly to my tv as of yet. I have tried xbox which is way too slow as my collection is very large.

I will be using CQC in the near future for a front end.

System sits in my basement which is very cool and I sound is not a problem as the amount of drives and fans in box are much louder than the card itself.

When I do install the card and if I end up seeing issues than I can also add another pc right next to it and and still utilize the card.

well i actually do some gaming on my machine so i am looking for the power. by the way both pc's run quad core phenom 2's. one is a 965 at 3.8ghz and the other is a x2 555 completely unlocked running at 3.5ghz. both are cooled with a hyper 212+. i have no complaints on noise.

i got the sapphire toxic 6850 on a 20% off deal on newegg and i should have it tomorrow. w00t!!!

i will let you all know how it goes. too bad i cant crossfire a 5770 and a 6850.

upgrade pics.











now i need a decent sized ssd.

and i know i could do better with the cable routing but i am in the box once a week dinking around.

once i get it set (yeah right) i will run the cables behind the mobo.

surprisingly the 6850 (with the overclock) is quieter than the 5770 with no overclock.

lol. well after installing the 6850 toxic my rig became crazy unstable. random shutdowns (like the power plug was pulled) out of the blue just running 2d applications. so i unplugged all of the usb devices and ran black ops and it was fine. then i ran crysis and the instability continued.

so i had to get another psu. i figured that my antec neo eco 620w with 48 amps on the 12v rail would be sufficient. ummmmmm no.

this is my rig:

AMD Phenom II x4 965BE overclocked to 3.8ghz (running 24/7)
4 GB G. Skill DDR3 1600 (oc)
MSI 785G-E53
VisionTek ClearQAM PCI Express x 1 tuner card
Zonet 802.11x Wireless PCI NIC
Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 6850
Cooler Master Hyper 212+ CPU Heatsink and Fan
4TB Hard Drive Space (4 1TB 7200 SATA drives)
LG Bluray Burner
Antec 300 Case
Antec Neo Eco 620w power supply

i replaced the psu with a coolermaster gx750w (60 amps on the 12v rail) and all seems fine for the time being. i hope that holds up.

Sounds more like an overheating issue than a PSU issue, although from what I understand these cards should throttle when overheating, not just shut down. Do you get a blue screen?

no blue screen. just immediate shutdown as if someone pulled the power cord. i think i isolated the psu because the more of a load i took off of the system the longer i could operate.

for instance, the system would would just shutdown (power cord pulled) on 2d if i was running mc7 live tv, outlook, tweetdeck and ie8 at the same time. i then pulled all of the usb devices and i could run with no issues. at that point i tried to game and it would run with less challenging games but crysis made it shutdown.

i monitor my temps as sop so it wasn't overheating. both the cpu and the gpu were below redline spec.

after i replaced the psu i could run crysis for an hour no issues.

so i am hoping that was the fix. just to be on the safe side from heat i did install my components differently in my box. i just havn't had time to post the pix yet.

rerouted hard drives to improve airflow around gpu fan.




new gpu in place.




angle two.




the problem now is that the cords on the the psu are too short.

It could have been your PSU overheating then. You could try and clean it with a compressed air can. The PSU itself seems powerful enough to handle a 6850, which from what I understand is like a 5770 on power consumption, perhaps just a bit more. I have the 5770 on a 400W fanless PSU, no problems even running furmark and having the 5770 at its temp limit where it starts to throttle. I also got like 5 or 6 HDDs and a Core 2 quad Q9450.

thats what i keep reading as i research. but the toxic edition is actually on a 6870 pcb and has two 75 watt pci-e connectors. i dont know how much of a difference that makes.

i am actually switching the antec 620w and the 5770 to my dedicated htpc that i still game on. the computer above is what i use in my office connected a combination of tv's and monitors. the other computer is at home and on a 47" toshiba lcd.

so i will see what happens when i hook everything back up at home. the psu and the 5770 are not really old and the office is clean with not much dust. the psu doesn't look dusty at all. all was fine until i swapped cards.

Finally upgraded from year 2004 6.1 Yamaha to new HDMI receiver, Onkyo TX-NR1008.

With 6850 HD audio works immediately. I tested DTS HD MA and Dolby TrueHD with MPC-HC and TMT3, it bitstreams perfect. All I needed to do was to enable HD audio in ffdshow and TMT since I moved from SPDIF.
TMT3 185 with patches for 68xx from November, Catalyst 10.10e, default ATI audio driver.

I do not hear silent stream bug. From what I understand this bug is when audio goes from silence to some sound and the sound is not enabled immediately so you lose a second or so of the sound.
If this is what I think I observed the "silent stream bug" on my SPDIF setup. When I pressed "test" in Windows speaker setup first second of sound from front left speaker was cut, everything after was OK.

This is not the case with 6850. I can hear everything. If you tell me content where this bug can be observed and where to look for, I can test it. So far works well.

AMD recently fixed the silent stream bug, I think with 10.8. There are still some other problems, but if you're not having them, you're good. People are reporting that with 10.12 the driver changed and made it incompatible with TMT.

I thought the new driver was compatible with TMT 5 and broke PowerDvd 10.

Yes, now I see that there are problems that I missed. Today I tried to watch live TV in Media Center and it didn't work.
I get error: Files needed to display video are not installed or not working correctly.
TV starts to show for few seconds, audio gets cycled, and then this error is displayed.

My previously recorded TV shows don't show up either. Same issue as described in threads below:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/...9-b36ce7494146
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1187530

MPC-HC displays .wtv files in green, unwatchable.

Everything worked fine when Sapphire 6850 was connected directly to TV.
The only change I did on PC since I connected to HDMI receiver was to adjust brightness/contrast and other video settings like that because it essentially became a new monitor and my previous settings were lost. No other changes.

1080p MKV, blu-rays still work fine. It is just live TV and recorded TV that stopped working. I tested it first time today.

Also there are some issues with 1080i audio synchronization. At first, I played 1080i MKV in MPC-HC OK. Then I decided to rewind a bit and after that audio synchronization was lost. I could not fix it by PC reboot. MPC-HC and Win Media Player were off by several seconds. Downloaded VLC player - it fixed the issue. Not sure why it broke. I never needed VLC player before.

Maybe it's not video card but some general Windows 7 HDMI issue with my receiver, not sure.

I have no clue on what's going on. I still have a lot to learn and my previous 3 years of HTPC experience don't seem to count.
I'm digging through green button forums now. Just when I though that I got a flawless upgrade, still some fighting needs to be done.

I didn't know that I had to reinstall drivers after I connect HDMI receiver. Is it the case?

That was confusing because everything worked except live and recorded TV in Media Center. Anyway, I re-installed AMD Catalyst and it fixed all issues.

Same 10.10e driver that I was using, same AMD HDMI driver. I installed 10.12a first. I read about the problems with it but I thought I would not be affected with my TMT3, I was wrong.
TV already started working. Then uninstalled and installed 10.10e and everything is working now. Well, everything that I was able to test so far.

Disregard my report about 1080i MKV audio synchronization issue. It was probably a bad file.

That was easy, I guess.

the MC error issue is known and it's been forever there with the AMD (ATI) provided drivers. One fix is to just use the Realtek drivers, and another is either to set the Windows mixer to stereo, or disable MC menu sounds.

Is it even AMD/ATI specific? I saw that people have been seeing it on nVidia cards just fine:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/87805/444135.aspx
Besides, Windows did not allow me to set output to stereo. 2.0 and 5.1 did not work, only 7.1 let me hear test sound.
I tried all these suggestions (except installing Realtek drivers) before reinstalling AMD drivers.

Yeah, I think at some point Nvidia also got this. I think with the 460, though I haven't been keeping track of this on Nvidia cards.

What do you mean "did not work"? Did you just try the test sounds, or did you actually set it to stereo and played something?