DVI vs. component video

[James_Ber]

I am planning on hooking up an old 1.5ghz pc I have lying around to my plasma tv. I always thought DVI was the best possible input source but ati said component video is better. Is this correct?

Also if my board is limited to 4x AGP, will this suffer much in quality?

Can anyone recommend a good videocard with DVI on it as well? My current box has a radeon 9700 Pro but as the older PC will just be used for watching movies (and very rarely at that) such a high end card would be overkill. I think the card I currently have in there is an old Radeon 128MB DDR VIVO.

Thanks for your expert advice in advance

[Bennyboy]

I didn't know that any plasma sets had DVI inputs but I can't see how ATi could consider that worse than analogue RGB via component! An analogue DB15 connector is better than component by virtue of its signal being closer to how film is encoded on a Telecine machine, with RGB and separate H and V sync, component syncs on green. You'd be hard pushed to tell the difference but if you have DVI on your plasma I'd use it.

The AGP 4x is a non-issue, especially when it comes to movies, you'll be fine.

Seeing as you won't be pushing the videocard too much you should be able to get away with spending very little. $50 or so on a Radeon 9200 should do the trick.

Bennyboy.

[DJ_Keoki]

My friend has a 65" Samsung DLP w/ DVI connection and when he hooks is iBook up... I swear that thing looks like a 65" computer monitor. :drool: