For video playback, what to upgrade on old comp, video or cpu?

[prom3theus]

I'm trying to get passable video playback on a PII 350 system. The current video card is pretty bad. It's a Cirrus Logic 4MB card. I'm running win98/2000, with 128MB ram. If I upgrade the cpu I of course need to upgrade the MB, and probably ram as well, which means a bit of $$ for this piece of crap. Can I get some improvement playing videos around 320x240 divx5.1/mp3 if I upgrade to something with 32mb ram? Is there any hardware decoding on a card that will make a difference for a divx video (in this quality/price range of about 10-15$ shipped)? If I upgraded to 256 RAM would that help significantly? I run about 50MB free after windows 2k boots and loads my stuff.

Thanks

[jeremymacmull]

as far as i know divx and xvid playback is almost entirely cpu power related and it normally does not make much of a difference what gfx card u have

so im sorry to say ull have to upgrade your cpu and mb but it neednt cost so much if you are uk based

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17132

an athlon 1100 and mb all for about 30 quid and thats a heck of lot better than what uve got and a lot cheaper than any card you were thinking of getting

if not uk based their must be similiar offers about u need about an p3 800 to play most movies with the quality settings on 0 my p3 850 laptop could play any movie i threw at it.

JEREMY

[scharfis_brain]

the most important speed factors are CPU-Speed and the Video-Overlay ability of your Graphics adapter.

[avih]

i think looking for a spare video card of a friend (or buying a 2nd hand one) would be a good 1st solution for now. something along the lines of nVidia TNT 1 or 2 16M/32M. ppl will probably give u one for free. should give enormous advantage over the Cirrus Logic that u now have, and will bring u just to the threshold.

but your cpu is still marginal. try to look for a thread about a minimal system for video playback. there were some good posts there. iirc the common understanding there was that u need something like 500-600MHz cpu, and a 16-32M video card with good overlay (nvidia/ati). onboard chippo video might need a bit stronger cpu (i'd say 10-20% more)

[prom3theus]

Thanks,

This is a secondary system, so I wasn't looking to do much heavy upgrading, just so that at minimal quality at around 320x240 I could watch a low-bandwidth video without skipping. I found an 8mb card and noticed a big improvement, still not good enough, so I'll try to get a 32mb one and see, and if not then maybe a cheap 500mhz system (oh if only I still had my old PIII 500E coppermine overclocked to 650 with that mushkin ram in it :)

[prom3theus]

I upgraded to a cheapo SIS 64mb agp video card 256-bit and even on the PII 350 system it now can play 320x240 video with mp3 audio with around 20% cpu usage in zoomplayer (cpu hog). I can also play larger videos, with quality set to lower settings in the decoder filter. I think like someone said if a person had a 500mhz system it should handle just about anything with a decent playback card. So, this will do for now. Thanks for the suggestions, and if anyone else reads this, I'd say go for a cheap but 64mb video card first and see if that lets you turn a piece of junk into an audio-video pc :)

[Petzku]

a PII 350Mhz should be able to decode mpeg4 video with a proper decoder and a video card capable of supporting overlays (which the original cirrus logic sure isn't).

As for the decoder I'd try a new FFDSHOW build.

[theReal]

Definitely get a new graphics adapter! You don't need the newest card, something like a Matrox G200 16MB is sufficient for MPEG 4, but that Cyrrus Logic 4MB sounds like one of these crappy cards that won't play any video right, not even with a 3GHz processor...

A PII 350 isn't that bad - but you could try to get a PIII 450 for slot A (*edit: it's Slot1, see below*), so you wouldn't need to upgrade board and RAM as well. Maybe there even was a PIII 500 or 550 for slot A (*edit: it's Slot1, see below*)? I'm not sure about that anymore.

[Soulhunter]

Thought Slot A was Athlon K7/K75 and Pentium 2 was Slot1 and 370... :confused:

Not really sure, but afaik Slot1 supports up to Pentium 3 1GHz class !!!


Bye

[theReal]

I think you're right, it was Slot 1 (it's a long time since I last bought a processor for that slot... ;) )