Oh in answer to your question there is no distortion on any other resolution level but I have lots of HD movies so i need 1920 x 1080. My 360 works fine at 1080i :S This is frustrating.

When the computer starts up it says in the corner 30 hertz which seems a little low to me (the TV is capable of higher) but it changes to this automatically. I've tried turning that up but it would seem my TV has a mind of its own.

No I don't think the TV is the problem, like I said it displayed 1920 x 1080 fine on my old crappy AGP computer. I should probably mention I'm using a DVI connection to the TV.

When I connected it the old computer at one point it was similarly distorted but a drop down menu saying something about "ATi plug and play" just above the resolution scroller fixed that. That's greyed out when using nVidia though.

Hmmm might give it a shot with my desktop computer which I use on 1920 x 1080 on a 24" 1080p monitor but I'm positive it's not the TV's problem. Decoding method aside it should still be able to show 1920 x 1080 resolution.

So I just finished my Media center computer today and excitedly hooked it up to my TV which is an Acer 42" 1080i.

Once I hooked it all up and fired it up, I set the desktop to 1920 x 1080 and everything is distorted, I don't know how to explain it other than it looks like everything has tiny lines deviding everything up and making words impossible to read and image quality extremely poor. I played around with nVidia control panel for a good while to no avail.

Specs:
CPU: Intel Pentium Dual Core @ 2.8GHz
GPU: XFX nVidia 8800GTS 320mb
RAM: 2 x 1GB DDR2
Mobo: Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 2.0
OS: Windows XP Media Center Edition (SP3) 32-bit

Obviously capable enough to run the desktop at 1920 x 1080 especially while testing before I started building I hooked up my old AGP computer to it which consisted of an ATi Radeon 9600PRO 256mb, 512mb of DDR400 RAM, an 800 front side bus mobo and XP SP2 and it still managed to spit out a clear desktop at 1920 x 1080 (although not in the most speedy manner).

Would this suit my needs fine?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131097

Reason i ask is because it's nearly $100 cheaper where I live.

You can't go wrong with either of these.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102730

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131161

The only thing I don't like about the HD4670 is that its only a 128 bit so it has lower bandwidth but it does have higher clock and memory speeds and the same amount of stream processors. I'd just go with the HD3850 it has 2 DVI outputs and costs less. You can get a vga to DVI adapter too if you wanted too.

Don't get a cheap 6200 or older card for $50 your better off spending a few bucks more and getting something a lot better.

nVidiaGaMer

Thanks heaps! my local store has the 3850 in stock so I might go pick one up tomorrow! If I got a converter I still wouldn't be able to get HD off it would I?

Before anyone says don't bother upgrading an AGP computer, it's not my desktop computer nor is it used but I'm thinking of putting a couple of TB hard drives in and turning it into a dedicated movie and tv show computer for the TV room but before I do that I obviously need a GPU that has DVI outputs instead of the VGA one it has at the moment to make it worth while. Probably one with either 512 or 1GB of memory.

Any suggestions? :)

oh god please help, this is so annoying.

So I just installed the latest nvidia drivers for my 1GB 9800GTX+ everything is fine except the taskbar now appears on my secondary screen. The computer acknowledges that my primary screen is my primary screen, says so in display settings and the nvidia control panel and all aplications and games start up on my primary screen. Just the task bar is on my second screen :S

I thought it might be a conflict with ultramon so I uninstalled that and restarted, no dice, double checked all the settings and restarted for good measure.. still on my 2nd screen.

I use a razer copperhead mouse and a razer lycosa keyboard. The mouse is excellent and I would highly recommend the Lachesis as it is basically a better copperhead, The mamba is cool but the price is a bit over the top for what is esentially just a gaming mouse.

The lycosa keyboard is cool and very responsive and they keys all feel great, back lighting is great. The media keys however are annoying, often they stop responding and i have to unplug and replug the keyboard back in. Also you have to pick which software you want it to work with (itunes, windows media player etc etc) instead of it just working normally. But it makes up for it in looks and having the ability to assign macros to everykey with I think 7 profiles.

Out of the keyboards you mentioned I would go for the logitech, my friend has one (reason I can't get one :P) and it's fantasitc, big, lots of keys and its own personal display which can be used to display things like now playing from itunes or whatever which I would find particularly useful. You can also get it to show system usage and other useful things. So that would be my choice out of the lot.

Thanks for the help guys!

wow that is one buff machine.....honestly if that is just for games, im sorry its a bit of an over kill, you could have a decent gaming machine for about half the cost of that beast.

but if your willing to spend the money on it, its an epic system

amaricrawrs

Yeah it may seem that way now, but I would rather spend a bit more and have a system that lasts than buying one which I end up spending more on with incremental upgrades.