Which upgrade for 720p/1080p?

Ok, wasn't sure where to post this and figured this might be the best forum.

Basically, I've just upgraded my old TV with a 42" Panasonic plasma. The only content I watch on it is through our old media pc which is quite slow with a Celeron 1GHz and Geforce 6800GT (AGP). As you can imagine, it's not very good with 720p or 1080p files and they pretty much become a slide show.

I'm looking for the cheapest and most effective upgrade in order to play at least 720p smoothly. Is there an AGP graphics card I can use that takes the job of decoding away from the CPU? Or perhaps I should upgrade the mobo and CPU? Maybe something similar to one of those ASRock mobos that supports old and new tech (AGP & PCI-E, DDR1 & DDR2 etc.) so I wouldn't have to do a complete overhaul?

The other option I can think of is maybe some sort of software to do the decoding on my main PC and stream through to the slower computer? Mind you, I'm not on the fastest wireless network and maybe the bandwidth requirements are too much if this were possible.

What do you think? The machine was fine playing SD content but now we have new demands it's just not up to the job.

Thanks

Doh, was just messing around on the media PC and realised that it's a 2.4GHz Celeron. Not sure why I remembered it as a 1GHz. Still very slow though.

With the rate of development of new products and the amount of upgrading discussions going on elsewhere in OC I'm really surprised there isn't a For Sale classifieds section in the forum.

Perhaps the most sensible option is to buy a s/h complete working system and upgrade MB, GPU and Ram as a single package Then look at a graphics card to suit.

For networking I suspect you'd be no better off trying to stream from another PC. Even if you could do what you want I think wireless is going to kill the benefit. It's a real bottleneck and speed killer. With a good w/less connection over a short distance with minimal interference you'll be lucky to 10%-20% of the advertised speed. That's about all they've achieved in lab tests at 1m!!

Cable is the way to go for large files or sustained transfer rates. A bit of Ethernet cable is cheap, secure, and will give you a far faster transfer rate - 100mb/sec. Or go with powerline adapters. Google some reviews.

lucid said:

With the rate of development of new products and the amount of upgrading discussions going on elsewhere in OC I'm really surprised there isn't a For Sale classifieds section in the forum.

Click to expand...

There is

A 2.4ghz celeron should be fine for HD material IF you can find an AGP DXVA GPU. If your celeron is S775, maybe look into the G4x chipsets - I believe they hardware decode video, otherwise, a cheap AMD chip and one of their integrated motherboards.

Thanks for the replies. So it looks like a graphics card with hardware decoding might be the most cost effective solution. I'll make a post in the graphics card section for suggestions.

What are you using to play your video - which player, codecs, graphics drivers etc?

I currently use VLC Media Player so don't require any codecs. Previously I was using Media Player Classic with FFDShow.

Driver-wise, I'm using the latest nVidia ones for Windows 7 32-bit, whatever version they are.