Is upgrade worth it.

Technology and Gaming
#1

Right, I’m building a bit of HTPC out of an old computer I had lying about the house. It has, up until now, only been used for emulators. But I’ve recently got into DIY audio, and figured this machine might as well serve as a source. With that in mind I bought a decent sound card. It had 7.1 surround support, so I figured I might as well watch my movies through this. So far so sensible. So I stuck XBMC on it. I went to play an xvid to test it. And it buffers all over the show. Not conducive to a good evening watching a movie.

So I figure a graphics card update may be a quick solution to the problem. Current setup is as follows.

2.6GHzs P4 based celeron
1GB DDR RAM (Another gig is on the way this is the 2GB is the max the mobo can handle)
Audigy 2zs soundcard
GeForce FX 5200 based graphics card

All running on win 7 home premium.

So I was thinking of sticking a HIS ATI Radeon HD 4350 iFan 512MB card in the box. Any thoughts on whether this will deal with all the video decoding?

I’d rather not have to build a new PC for this if possible. Simply because the money would be better spent when I’m building my amps/speakers.

Any help given would be most appreciated.

#2

my mom has a celeron 2.6, it’s not the GPU, with the celerons you can barely run h264 at dvd res, let alone 720p, all due to the tiny L2 cache. get a P4 CPU 2.8 at least and install CoreAVC, disable deblocking and you might be able to watch 720p with mpc-hc even with a geforce 5200

#3

aside from sersoft´s suggestion, another gig of ram couldn´t hurt.

#4

Believe me, your CPU is perfectly fine. I’m running an HTPC that plays 1080p movies on a 1.7ghz p4 running Windows 7 ultimate and Boxee (based on XBMC). What you need is the 8400 GS PCI card. It supports DXVA (which offloads HD video to the GPU), is cheap, and can run from a normal PCI slot (read: not PCI-E, not AGP, just good ol’ PCI). I use that with my low clocked P4 and can run this HTPC without a hitch.

Note, if you’re planning to put a linux distro on it, the 8400gs also supports VDPAU, which is the linux alternative to dxva.

#5

Yeah, this is the fastest processor the mobo can handle, so I was hoping to offload the video processing to the graphics card. It’s a mini-atx so the only real space I have left is AGP port. (I have USB 2 and network adapter taking up the other 2 PCI ports). So basically I’m looking for a cheap card that will offload all the video from the CPU. HDMI and VGA are also two things I would like.

#6

Hmm, what prices are you looking for?

This card is the cheapest I can find that has HDMI and works on AGP port.

#7

Lol, isn’t that the card I was asking about to begin with? I can get that card for about £35-40 so I wouldn’t mind spending that. But the critical issue is will this graphics card give me the ability to play decent quality divx/xvid/h264 without having to buffer all over the show.

If it doesn’t then I may have to wait a few months and buy a new mobo, processor, if it happens to be pci-e i’d have to replace all the internal cards in the computer, and a good chance I would have to change the ram too. Which may end up costing ££££ which I’d rather not spend if possible.

Or rather I’d not spend money on an AGP card that doesn’t do the job and then has to be basically thrown out.

#8

It was? :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah, you should just get a new rig.

#9

I don’t want to waste money on a new rig if I can avoid it. Its only gonna be used for video and music. It’s plenty powerful enough to run all the emus I want. I just need to know will that graphics card will make it run the videos better.

#10

a 1.8ghz P4 has more L2 cache than a 2.6ghz celeron.

But yeah, the 8400GS is a good idea.

#11

Is the 8400GS any better than the ATi 4350? No one seems to know if this card will do what I want lol, it seems logical to get an AGP card if possible, purely for the speed advantage!

Sersoft, my biggest problem is that my mobo only supports a 400Mhz FSB, would a lower clocked P4 make much of a difference?

#12

Again, the CPU shouldn’t make that much of a difference because most of the workload is offloaded to the GPU anyway. If my much lower clocked p4 is under 50% usage during 1080p movies then his higher clocked celeron with a lower cache should handle it just fine.

I’m not sure about the performance of the other cards, and since I have personal experience with the 8400gs in a desktop environment closely resembling yours it’s all I can recommend. I do suggest you find a way to free up a PCI slot for the 8400gs and get a cheap passive DVI to HDMI cable; do you really need USB 2.0 on an HTPC?

#13

I’ve had a look inside. I didn’t realise the there is a PCI secreted behind some kind of weird modem port (might be mini pci or something). They share a hole in the back. Yeah I want the USB 2 for data transfer with my 2x1TB drives. And I’m building a sega saturn to USB adapter and I want to use the internal USB port so I can have the saturn pad ports coming out of a spare 5.25 inch drive space for the emus. Lol, some of those PS3 dev boards are actual dev boards with atmega32u2 chips in them. I seriously recommend the Minimus32 avr for anyone who wants a cheap prebuilt avr dev board. They’re only £7!

I’ll reckon I’ll go for your 8400gs if it’s playing 1080p on an old P4. (If it turns out the cache really is that much of a bottleneck I can pick up a P4 for less than a tenner)

Oh and thanks for the help!

#14

If you do pick up a P4, see if you can get a 2.8ghz one that fits your socket. What is your socket? It’s not much more expensive (only a few bucks more), but increases performance tremendously. Also, make sure DXVA is enabled in the video player you’re using.

#15

Hey Russilker, those cards are like hens teeth in the UK. The only one I found is a 400 mile round trip for the person I know who lives closest. (bestbuy UK won’t ship it). Everywhere seems to e selling he PCI-E equivalent. I thought I got lucky twice. Once on amazon (turns out it pci-e) and the other time was with a website I found earlier, and has since closed down and become an advertisement site (didn’t take long). I might try and find an AGP equivalent. Its a socket 478, but the FSB is only 400Mhz so it can’t deal with the faster (and cheaper) ~3GHz P4s.

Unless you know a good retailer not charging the earth for this card?

EDIT:

In case anyone is reading this for posterity I got an HD3450 and it works really well.

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