HELPPPPP with 1080p!!!!

ive got an old computer i want to stick on my new 1080p lcd. its an pentium d 3.2ghz with 2gb ram, 7600gt x4 pci, 775 dual vsta.

it can play 720p film but cant hack 1080p. wats the best thing to do?

new motherboard and graphics card?

i dnt want to spend loads of money just minimum amount. i was looking at an hd 4670.

Thanks Sam

4670 would do the job fine, but you could go down to a 4350 and still get your hardware decoding, which is what your after

Ahh the good old ASRock motherboard :D
First things first.
Check load when playing a dvd at 1080p, simplest way is open up task manager while it's playing and see what the total load is like and if anything is stealing a large chunk of cpu or memory
Could be a bunch of viruses/malware/or background crud that's stealing all your resources.

if no problem is found, the CPU is hardly breaking a sweat and your memory isn't being blitzed, then yes replaceing the graphics card is the next step.
Good news is that most latest series low end cards do a great job of video decoding so you shouldn't need to spend a lot or replace the psu or such.
4670 would be fine as would a 4350 as Madduck pointed out, so would a 9600gso, 9500gt or even 9400gt

I can definately recommend the 9500gt, running one in my htpc and cpu load is minimal (well under 20% average) whilst watching bluray, this is at 720 though but i suspect 1080 wont differ that much.

You can get an HD4650 GDDR3 for 55 quid or the HD4670 for £64 which will also do the job:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151454

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=pr...imit=10&page=1

The HD4650 GDDR3 is slower than a HD4670 but if money is tight it is still a good upgrade over a 7600GT:

http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/ind...=647&Itemid=27

what motherboard would people suggest then as it will only allow pci x4 or agp? (775 dual vsta) As the graphics cards suggested are all pci x16.

ive got a pentium d core 2 3.4ghz with 2gb of 556 ddr2 ram memory.

is 2 gig of memory enough also?

when i checked the cpu in task manager it goes up to 80% then the video stops cpu goes bk to 20% and then the video starts again. the 1080p videos dont run at the right speed and the sound is way out this is my graphics card right? 720 films run fine!

also ati or nvidia for 1080p films which is better?

Thanks Sam

My NAS machine is an Athlon XP 3000, 1gb Ram and an AGP 512mb 2600XT, hooked up to a 24" 1920x1200 screen and it plays Blu-ray/HD-DVD/capped HD content from disk or drive just fine.

So, as per above, a new card should sort you, assuming your PSU is rated high enough.

Bare in mind that the gpu decoding is for the proper profiles on hddvd / blu ray.
A lot of mkv's or quicktimes won't be decoded on the graphics card.
My e2140 @ 1.6ghz struggles with 1080p mkv but as I have an hd2400 1080p bluray is no problem.

it will be mkv files i will be playing mostly. so does the graphics card not decode that format? so what do i need to get them 2 work properly?

thanks sam

Quote:

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Originally Posted by powellsamuel

what motherboard would people suggest then as it will only allow pci x4 or agp? (775 dual vsta) As the graphics cards suggested are all pci x16.

ive got a pentium d core 2 3.4ghz with 2gb of 556 ddr2 ram memory.

is 2 gig of memory enough also?

when i checked the cpu in task manager it goes up to 80% then the video stops cpu goes bk to 20% and then the video starts again. the 1080p videos dont run at the right speed and the sound is way out this is my graphics card right? 720 films run fine!

also ati or nvidia for 1080p films which is better?

Thanks Sam

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My computer has a 8x slot and 16x cards work in it fine. There will be some performance drop with putting a 16x card in a 4x slot but it should otherwise work fine. I would save the money for a new motherboard towards a full system upgrade in the future.

Edit: the HD4670 is a PCI-E 2.0 card. The chipset on your motherboard may have some issues with PCI-E 2.0 cards. IIRC 8800gt cards did have an issue. The HD3850 is compatible with the 4COREDUAL-VSTA according to the Asrock website. However this needs a better PSU though than a HD4670.

Ebuyer have them for £65:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148212

I never noticed that they gave you a supported graphics card list lol. ok so the card you just suggested isnt on my motherboard its an 77dual vsta.



what would you go for now and would you run xp or vista, or doesnt matter?

i think i better check my psu aswell would help wouldnt it lol!!

Thanks Sam

I assume that your motherboard is a 775 Dual Vsta??

There maybe some hope for you yet!!

I just checked this thread:

http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=74732

It seems that a BIOS update will enable compatibility with HD38** series cards:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/download.as...ual-VSTA&s=775

Do you have DDR or DDR2 RAM??

You could get a G31 based motherboard and a HD4670 for £100 if you have DDR2 RAM. XP should be fine for now. There are some Vista exclusive games coming out but for most things XP is perfectly capable. You should be able to sell your 7600GT and motherboard for a few quid too. This could go towards a new PSU if you need one. You can get some decent ones off Scan for around 30 quid:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/400w-...ed-cooling-fan

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/350W-...ATA-80plus-Eff

Quote:

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Originally Posted by powellsamuel

it will be mkv files i will be playing mostly. so does the graphics card not decode that format? so what do i need to get them 2 work properly?

thanks sam

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If you are using the right version of Media Player Classic (the Home Cinema flavour) then you can get hardware accelerated x264 (usual format that the mkv container is used for) with nvidia 8x00 and 4x00 series ati cards. its pretty impressive stuff.

The only caveat is that the 1080p content has to be encoded correctly to enable the DXVA acceleration - some of the newer 1080p files i've tried have worked fine and run great, some dont and so are limited by my CPU...

I'll try and get a screenie of my task manager playing back some 1080p content... watch this space

check out:

Wall-E 1080p and Iron Man 1080p with minimal CPU usuage (13% of dual-core 3800x2 @ 2.5ghz). Good old 4870 doing all the work :)

http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/8...dinglt2.th.jpg

disclaimer: i have these on bluray too

just checked my psu and ive got 350w's. i think thats a really good idea for the same price. for some reason i thought you couldnt fit a micro atx in an atx case. the ram ive got is ddr2 533 x 2 1gb

so here is my suggestions

scan.co.uk/Products/Biostar-G31-M7-TE-Intel-G31-Sok-775-PCI-E-(x16)-DDR2-533-667-800-SATA-3Gb-s-Micro-ATX-VGA

scan.co.uk/Products/512MB-Gigabyte-HD4670-PCI-E-20(x16)-2000MHz-GDDR3-GPU-750MHz-320-Cores-D-Sub-DL-DVI-I-HDMI

bearing in mind this is just for .mkvs and hd playback. will this cut it?
also would xp 64bit or vista 64bit (vista for directx 10) make a difference?

I would get the following card instead:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/512MB...-DL-DVI-I-HDMI

The motherboard looks fine. Regarding DX10 most games actually run better under DX9 in XP or Vista. You can get Crysis to run under DX9 in Vista and you get higher framerates. Also the DX9 and DX10 versions of Crysis show very little graphical difference! Farcry 2 is the only game which runs better under DX10 in Vista than DX9 in XP. Vista 64 bit is far better than XP 64 bit according to most people though.

I would also consider a new power supply such as the Silverpower as an HD4670 will probably still consume more power than your old 7600GT. Considering that it has at least twice the performance of a 8600GT it is still quite an efficient card.

The x264 files that are not dxva compatible can generally be "patched" to confirm to standards. I can't recall the program name at the moment, but it's a simple case of chaging the profile flags to read dxva compatability iirc.