Technology Forum

Unlike the common "what video card is better" query, I have done considerable research and there are a few things that I can't find the appropriate information on.I have no interest in playing games, but I do have a need to playback and edit HD movies which are in a format called "AVCHD Format" and have a file extension of .M2TS. These files are produced by a Canon HG-10 HD Camcorder. Canon supplies a wretched program from Corel to get them off the camera's hard drive onto that of the computer.I have the latest CyberLink PowerDVD 8 Ultra for playing them, and PowerDirector 7 Ultra for editing them.Cyberlink does support (sort of) these types of files with both these programs. I can open, play and edit them on my ThinkPad T61p.However I need to be able to open play and edit them on my desktop machine which has the following (current) specs.Power SupplyThermaltake TruePower Model W0133RU 1200WMotherboard - ASUS P5WD2 PremiumProcessor - Intel Pentium D 960 3.6 GhzVideo Card - ASUS 6600 TOP/GTThis machine is unuseable with these files because the video card is so underpowered that the video files open for about one second and then close. My belief is that since the GPU on the 6600GT does not offload any of the graphic functions, trying to play these files brings the CPU to it's knees.In my research I have found the concepts of "stream processors" and of hardware decoding of MPEG-2, H.264 or VC-1 data streams which is supposed to take the load off the CPU and all hardware decoding is done on the video card GPU. It appears that modern nVidia cards may have hardware decoding of the MPEG-2, and H.264 data streams, but not of the VC-1 type data stream.nVidia appears to call this a feature "NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology". However some reviews of nVidia cards I read seem to say that VC-1 hardware decoding isn't all that important, while the other two types are.Moreover, it seems possible that these three types of data streams are particularly applicable to Blu-Ray DVD's, and although the Canon Tech Support seems clueless about the data stream produced by the files created by their camera, the manual does say that "The HG10 is Canon's first AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) Format Hard Disk Drive camcorder. AVCHD uses an MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video codec..."So here we have yet a different standard MPEG-4 and H-.264.None of the video card specs I have seem mention MPEG-4, however they do have a different number of "Stream Processors". One card I am considering, the ASUS 9600GT Silent has 64 stream processors, and another card I am considering the ASUS EN9800GTX+/HTDP/512Mcard has 128 stream processors.So for my purposes, I don't know what effect if any having double the amount of stream processors would have on my viewing and editing of these video files.I don't care about the difference in price between these two cards, but I do care about the noise. Although when I called ASUS Presales, the salesperson claimed he had one running on his desk and couldn't even hear it, one reviewer said "While the fan used is the same one as on the 8800 GTS 512 MB, its rotation speed is much higher - at idle as well as under load. Only the HD 3870 X2 took the booby prize for being noisier under load. But it was even quieter at idle - roughly equivalent to the 8800 GTS - which the 9800 GTX should have matched. In practice, its noise wasn’t all that bad at idle, but the fan accelerates very fast as soon as you launch a game, and sometimes even when idling, and the noise level becomes frankly obnoxious.".If I have to in order to get good performance, I guess I would tolerate the noise, if the lack of stream processors is something a gamer might miss but I would not notice, I would prefer to have the silent card. The machine is loud enough as it is with a Hyper6+ CPU cooler and a Thermaltake high capacity 120mm case fan on the rear of the case.So any information that some of you video card experts could provide about the effect of stream processors or the lack thereof and hardware decoding of MPEG-4 files on nVidia based cards would be greatly appreciated. I am not interested in a Radeon solution, having had a lot of grief with the ATI brand of cards and their tech support years ago.