Time to replace ATI 9700 AGP?

[cheechy]

Hi,

Some advice please. I've found out since of last night that the HTPC I've just built from old but 'good for the time' kit from a few years back doesnt quite cut it for unfaltering 720p playback.

It consists of a Athlon XP2800+ (the old 32bit stuff), 1GB RAM and a 9700 (not pro) AGP card.

Would I get away with just upgrading the graphics card or will I have to replace MB and graphics?

I'm not necessarily looking to playback 1080p at the moment.

Cheers

[Melbourne720]

Is the CPU maxing out with playback? If so then that could be your slow down cause.

Certainly a 7600 GT would be a performance kick, but it might just move it from one bottleneck to another.

If you have a few hundred to spend, now could be a chance to move to a newer platform (what I am considering when my 6800 can no longer hack it). As AGP cards are so pricey at the moment, it makes sense to consider a move to a core 2 duo setup, with maybe a 6300 CPU, new mobo, 7300 GT DDR3, 2GB of DDR2 RAM.

What is the budget?

[cheechy]

I suspect I'm going to have the can the idea just now and lump it

Other commitments have shown their ugly heads and I'll just have to play stuff on the main PC (Opteron 170) if the need arises.

Thanks for the input though and I'll have a look at CPU use when I'm playing back video to see if it is indeed CPU. I suspect it may well be a combination of both GPU and CPU in my case.

[charleski]

What sort of stuff are you trying to play back at 720p?

If it's compressed with h.264 (AVC, MPEG4-Part 10, Quicktime), you might try getting the coreAVC decoder (costs around $10), which gives highly optimised software playback.

[cheechy]

ooo I'll look that one up thanks for the tip.

[jamena]

er... you should be absolutely fine for 720p playback on that pc! And upgrading your graphics is unlikely to help unless you're getting hardware mpeg4 decoding abilities. My mildly overclocked XP-M2500 and 9800pro have no problems with 720p, and is fine with some of the 1080 samples I've downloaded. Other 1080p samples don't play back nicely, but I think it';s a codec problem rather than a lack of hardware. Having said that if you want to upgrade the first thing you want there for better htpc use is cpu (and probably motherboard as you're likely to change socket-type...

I would suggest that the faltering you're seeing is something to do with the software you're using for playback and/or the compression as mentioned above! Recommended specs for (non-MCE) htpc setups are rather low in the grand scheme of things. try some different hdtv samples

obviously there's more than one opinion out there but IMO you shouldn't have any trouble with 720p... and changing your gpu won't help either way (unless you plan to play recent 3d games on it too)

http://www.pchdtv.com/faq.php#faq0000001
http://www.linuxis.us/linux/media/ho...our_needs.html

[jamena]

p.s. try the following - when your HD clip is open in whatever player you are using try giving the player application a higher-than-normal priority through task manager. I just tried it with the microsoft wmv 1080p samples and they're nice and smooth Dunno what was stealing cycles from it, but from what I've read the AMD setup tends to struggle due to having a lower fsb than P4 pc's or something. Faster hardware will also help but if you feel like tweaking stuff you should be able to cope with what you've got