[ceez]

hello everyone,

I have a bit of a concern.

I have a dell dimension e310, 400W psu, 3.4ghz p4, 2gigs ram, 300gb hd, ATI Radeon HD2400. The CPU, PSU and Vid were recently upgraded along with an LG BR player from newegg.

I think my pc is capable enough of playing the video, yet when I play a br disk the video skips (along with the audio). If I insert a good ol' dvd it plays fine.

I was considering the thought of a bad BR player.

What is your take on this problem!??!

Thanks for your input,

ceez

[CoffeeFiend]

Your problem is your CPU. Unless you upgrade your vid card to one that can do the decoding in hardware, and manage to find a set of drivers + codec where it actually works (unlike my geforce POS card), your CPU isn't good enough.

A P4 3.4 isn't all that fast by today's standards, my old CPU that's a year old (E2160) that was like $70 at the time benches 3x faster than the old P4 3.06GHz it replaced.

Some Blu-Ray titles manage to peak some core 2 duo's to 100% cpu usage (then again, it depends on the title, the player, codec used, vid card, etc).

Of course DVDs play fine, a P3 can handle those... However there's a HUGE difference between crappy old mpeg2 (where the vid card does 95% of the job anyways) that's easy to decode and at low resolutions (~1/3 megapixel), and very high bitrate encrypted 1080p (6x more pixels) H.264 video (WAY more work to decode than mpeg2) with fancy audio and all like Blu-Ray uses.

Edit: if that can give you a better sense of what kind of specs you need, WinDVD 9 calls for:

bare minimum: Athlon64 X2 3800+ (that's a dual core chip), or similar-ish Core 2;
recommended is an Athlon64 X2 4200+, or a Core 2 Duo E6400.

PowerDVD lists lower specs, but you can get by on a slow CPU with a fancy vid card and everything else setup perfect... Not very realistic though. And even then, if it works at all, it's probably at the cost of turning off just about all video post-processing. They do state "Dual or quad core processors recommended" though.

This post has been edited by crahak: 15 December 2008 - 10:25 PM

[cluberti]

I would suggest a Radeon 3xxx or 4xxx HD card, with the Avivo chipset. It will do the h.264 decoding on the video card with software that supports it (I believe PowerDVD 8.0 Ultimate does, for instance).

[ceez]

d@mn it guys....this would totally suck. So you're telling me that a 3.4 p4 and a 512 vid card just dont cut the butter anymore?!?! that just plain ticks me off.

I was looking over again at the specs of that ati card and it has all the stuff you guy mention, the h.264 and the ati avivo technology, etc... check it out here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814161238

the BR player is this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16827136154

and if this doesnt work out, well....I should of just forked out an additional 50 bucks to buy an actual player! >[

[ceez]

well i'l be d@mned again... I just tried playing the br again but this time with the task manager open and the cpu spikes like crazy when it starts the video.

I honestly thought that I could turn this little ol' pc into an hdpc with a decent vid card and by upgrading the 2.8 for a 3.4....stupid hyperthreading....useless!

so I just got myself a br player that dont play squat....man i am p***ed.

[CoffeeFiend]

ceez, on Dec 15 2008, 11:43 PM, said:

I was looking over again at the specs of that ati card and it has all the stuff you guy mention, the h.264 and the ati avivo technology, etc...

Like cluberti said, for those things, you really want a newer 3xxx or 4xxx radeon card. The old one won't really cut it unfortunately.

ceez, on Dec 15 2008, 11:43 PM, said:

I should of just forked out an additional 50 bucks to buy an actual player! >[

A lot of those also suck unfortunately. Super slow startup times, old profiles (pre v2.0), no support for optional audio codecs, etc. Right now, there's only a handful of decent players out there: the PS3 (no thanks!), or a couple stand alone players (e.g. Sony BDP-S550 & Panasonic DMP-BD50), most which cost about twice as much as a PS3 (none being cheaper than the PS3 AFAIK).

My front neighbour bought one a couple months ago, and it has it's fair share of issues. He tried to get it RMA'ed but was told to "just unplug it so it resets itself" when it does something strange. That sounds like quality, doesn't it?

I love the 1080p, but Blu-Ray as a format generally sucks, and so do the players. They just "resecured" BD+ again too, yay for more DRM! It's like these people do everything in their power to make sure we don't want to buy their stuff...

BTW, upgrading to a ~20% faster CPU wasn't worth it, unless the CPU was just about free. For ~$100 you can get a CPU that's like 3 to 4x faster than that once OC'ed.

[ceez]

@crohak, yeah i've read some articles stating about the same info, not as good yet....video looks great, yet player technology is bit behind.

The upgrade wasnt expensive at all, thankgoodness, at least i'll have a decent pc, just how it was pre-br but with a better video card.

Would part of the probem be cased because ii am hooked up to my 42" toshiba LCD? more display output power or smething ike that? Maybe play better on a regular 19" lcd with dvi input?

I know-i know,finding excuses....just live it.....it wont play unless I fork ouf or another pc that has dual or quad core!

[CoffeeFiend]

ceez, on Dec 16 2008, 12:13 AM, said:

Would part of the probem be cased because ii am hooked up to my 42" toshiba LCD? more display output power or smething ike that? Maybe play better on a regular 19" lcd with dvi input?

Nope. Doesn't affect things at all.

[ceez]

crahak, on Dec 16 2008, 12:16 AM, said:

Nope. Doesn't affect things at all.

man just digging that hole deeper....*sigh*

[cluberti]

Sorry, but the P4 really isn't very good for anything nowadays (can't speak to the 512MB of RAM - should be fine for XP). Honestly, I'd build up the cash flow for a HTPC box with a 3xxx silent card, a decent Core2 Duo or Quad, and 2-4GB of RAM. Heck, get a good tuner card (like a Radeon Theater 650 Pro) and you can have an MCE box too, either XP or (better) Vista HTPC box.

[ceez]

sorry guys, but I dont mean to go off in a different direction than what my original post was about, but I was looking at several mobo/cpu combos at newegg as well as intels processor spec finder and I am a bit confused about the many flavors and which one is better than the other...

core i7 is their newer one so obviously more expensive, believe it's a quad at heart. the extreme version I am going to assume it's just faster/efficient and more expensive

then there are the 2 duo desktop, 2 duo extreme, 2 quad. Some have similar same speed, so what's the diff begreen extreme and 2 quad

core 2 solo....just by the name i am thinking that's sooo last year or something.

I guess what I am trying to get to is what is the major difference between them since some share the same ghz, is it just the larger cache or bus speed?!!?

man I havent kept up with any of this stuff in long while!

thanks again,

ceez

[Zxian]

Extreme editions of processors typically just have unlocked multipliers. At stock speeds, there's no difference between my Q6700's and the QX6700's.

An E5200 (which is still at the bottom of the performance charts of today's CPUs) will still run circles around that P4 you have.

[CoffeeFiend]

ceez, on Dec 16 2008, 03:08 PM, said:

Some have similar same speed

You have to keep in mind that clock speed only means so much. Clock speed is a bit like RPM of an engine -- it hardly means anything by itself. The actual "speed" would be more like the product of the clock speed multiplied by the IPC (instructions executed per clock cycle) -- for a simple CPU with only 1 core. And IPC can vary quite a bit from a CPU to another. The number of cores also affect things quite a bit.

And then, there's all the other factors. Size and speed/latency of all caches (L1, 2 and sometimes 3), the type of BUS (FSB, HT, QPI) and its speed, the way RAM is accessed (via FSB or memory controller on-die, in the CPU), different SIMD instruction sets supported by CPUs (e.g. SSE4.1) and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Anyways. Here's some simple numbers:
Core 2 Duo E8400, clocked @ 3GHz, scores 2897 on passmark - cpu mark;
P4 3GHz, clocked @ 3GHz, scores around 450 (like 6x slower, despite having the same clock speed)

My old E2160 (which was a low-end chip last year, now discontinued) once OC'ed to similar speeds as the P4 it replaced, encodes video/compresses in RAR format and everything else (benchmarks included) about 3x faster. A XviD encode that would have taken 60 minutes to complete now only takes 20. Something that would have taken 15 minutes to RAR up would now only take 5.

Clock speed alone doesn't mean a whole lot as you can see...

[ceez]

Zxian, on Dec 16 2008, 04:11 PM, said:

An E5200 (which is still at the bottom of the performance charts of today's CPUs) will still run circles around that P4 you have.

man that's cruel.... :oP

Yeah I was being a bit more thorough on that processor spec finder and noticed the bunch of different cache, bus speeds and such.

I would probably look into a core2 quad combo (if costs permits) or else a core 2 duo starting at 2gigs or ram. That should be suffice for a hdpc right?!?!

thanks again for such educational posts, another good reason to be part of msfn!

thanks guys!!!!

This post has been edited by ceez: 16 December 2008 - 04:29 PM

[CoffeeFiend]

ceez, on Dec 16 2008, 05:27 PM, said:

man that's cruel.... :oP

Nah, cruel would be letting you know my *discontinued* used-to-be-low-end last year CPU (wasn't even marketed as a Core 2 Duo...) and that was only $70 back then does too In fact, it's almost impossible to find a slower CPU in any computer shop than that P4 (besides the super low power Atom chips)

ceez, on Dec 16 2008, 05:27 PM, said:

That should be suffice for a hdpc right?!?!

Any Core 2 Duo will suffice. Even the dirt cheap E22xx series would (then again, the E5200 is only like $10 more).

[ceez]

ok now you guys are just having fun at the expense of my poor p4.....it put up a good fight for soon to be past 4 years RIP soon!

if i am going to upgrade i might as well go for the core 2 duo instead of one of the e22xx dual cores

how about mobos, what are good ones nowadays? asus, giga, msi, evga<-never heard of that one?!?!

thanks guys

[CoffeeFiend]

ceez, on Dec 16 2008, 05:57 PM, said:

if i am going to upgrade i might as well go for the core 2 duo instead of one of the e22xx dual cores

The e22xx also use core 2 duo cores (Allendale in this case). It's essentially one, just not marketed as such. Same thing for the E5200, it's a Core 2 Duo in all but its name. But no point in saving $10 by picking the E2220 over the E5200. The extra $10 brings you 0.1GHz extra (all of 100MHz -- not that it really makes any difference), but it has double the L2 cache.

ceez, on Dec 16 2008, 05:57 PM, said:

how about mobos, what are good ones nowadays? asus, giga, msi, evga<-never heard of that one?!?!

Lots of people love Asus boards but I'm more of a Gigabyte guy myself.

[Zxian]

The P4 can serve other purposes if you don't want to get rid of it, but playing HD content is a fairly intense task (hence why you need the upgrade).

All of my Intel systems are built on ASUS boards (P5B Deluxe, P5K Premium, Maximus Formula), and I've got an AMD based media center using a Gigabyte board. Your best bet is to read the reviews on a site like NewEgg to find out real world experiences from users.

[cluberti]

Speaking of real-world, I'm running Vista Ultimate SP1 x64 on a Q9550 Core2Quad on an Asus P5Q Deluxe with 8GB RAM, an ATI Radeon 3650 (silent HIS), and some 320GB HDDs as an HTPC and MCE box and it chews through everything I throw at it. And, to boot, it's just as fast in about every benchmark as an i7 920 (except for memory-bound apps, where the i7 will perform far better due to the on-die controller).

Drop the following into a nice case with a decent PSU and a BR drive, and it should run very well under XP or Vista:

Asus P5Q Deluxe - $190:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131297

Intel Core2Quad Q9550 - $320:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16819115041

G.Skill 8GB Kit (4GB x 2) - $110:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820231151

HIS ATI Radeon 3650 512MB DDR3 (silent) - $110:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814161220

WD Caviar WD3200AAKS 320GB HDD - $55 (x4 = $220):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136074

Total, $950USD

[spacesurfer]

Real world experience tells me to avoid ASUS.... they are probably good boards but just because mine died after 3 years, I am partial to ASUS now. I had heating problems in that one.

My new Gigabyte runs very cool. I'd vote for Gigabyte.

Quote

Q9550 Core2Quad

That's a nice processor. A bit more than cheapest Core i7 but a system with Core i7 will cost you more than with this quad core.

This post has been edited by spacesurfer: 16 December 2008 - 06:52 PM