PC fast enough?

[redcane]

I've gotten enough spare parts here and there to put together a celeron 500 system. Now, some time ago I had a cel500 with a TNT2/ultra, and it played every DivX I came across smoothly. This "new" cel500 system has an intel i810 graphics chipset, and I have to turn the post processing quality to "lowest" to get it to play properly.
I'm hopefully swapping the TNT2/ultra (AGP) for a TNT (PCI), since I have no AGP slots (yeah I know, it's horrid), and I was planning to put the TNT in the machine to speed video playback.... Hopefully it will run movies nicely after that... I could put the card in my other machine (another crapbox with no AGP)..

Anyway, I guess I was wondering about other peoples experiences. Are the TNT's just that good at 2d that they can make that much difference? The PC seems to eat CPU time when the movies are a decent res with the i810 video card....

[The Edge]

I have a TNT 8mb in the job on a sh*tbox PC I tinker with. Seems o play XviD and Divx 3.11 fine (max post-processing).
K6-750 processor.
It seems to have problems with DivX 5 on max post-processing. I don't use DivX5 so the system is fine for the moment. I think I have a TNT2 laying around somewhere.

Oh yeah, the i810 chipset are really awful. Usually 8mb shared with RAM.

Edge

[redcane]

hmmm, maybe it's more because I'm using the divx5 decoder than for any other reason (It wsa what I had lying around on a cd)....
I might try divx v4 or something...

If I can get this box playing perfectly with the video card it's got, I'll put the card in my other machine...

[The Edge]

Why not get your hands on ffdshow (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Filters/ffdshow-20021213.exe)
Far better DivX/XviD decoder. More options, etc.....

Edge

[theReal]

Oh yeah, the i810 chipset are really awful. Usually 8mb shared with RAMI agree - I've seen a Celeron 700 on an i810 board with onboard graphics that wasn't even able to play a DVD fluently...

[killingspree]

i've had a TNT in my old computer (PII 400) running on win2k and it was playing DVDs/ DivX fine, but i've come to know that the drivers you use matter a lot! never use the windows generic drivers with it !!! i had the best results using detonator 28.xx drivers both the 3x.xx and 4x.xx gave me more problems than performance gain.

regards
steVe

PS: oh i don't know how much it matters if you have a celeron. from what i've had they are way worse than the Pentium processors! so this would affect performance

[naysayer]

i've got a 400mhz dell inspiron laptop, running windows 98se. it came with 64M ram, and it wouldnt play any of my divx movies worth crap. frames would drop, and audio would go out of sync, even using ffdshow and no postprocessing at all.
so i popped 256M into it, hoping that it might help, and it didnt....
then i thought...maybe with all that ram, disk caching would help.. so i used a tweak tool to set my drive cache to an ungodly large amount, and i was surprised to find that my movies played even worse.
so then i figured if a big cache made it worse, maybe no disk cache would be better... so i turned off all drive caching, and also disabled my swap file... and that actually worked! i still get some dropped frames occasionally, but it looks good and doesnt get out of sync.
my guess is that windows likes to cache, and while its playing a 650M movie, its trying to figure out how to best to cache it... and i dont want to cache the movie anyways, so turning it all off probably frees up enough resources to stop the stuttering.

so for me 400mhz with 256M works just fine, but only if theres no swap and no drive cache.

[theReal]

With my old Athlon 1000, 384MB RAM, I always disabled the swap file in Win98 because it was so much faster. The system was responding very quickly and it started much faster (and 99% of the time, 384MB without swap file was more than enough)