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Cheapest CPU for HD htpc?

stephentw

stephentw

stephentw

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Joined
11 Oct 2007
Posts
32
I'm looking at upgrading to something worthy of playing blueray and hd-dvd's with Powerdvd.

I'm currently a bit below spec with a p4 3ghz and only 1gb ram. So obviously I'm looking for an upgrade on that, won't be playing games though, just for media encoding and playback oh and not overclocking.

Someone recommended a wolfdale but they look like overkill and I'm sure something considerably cheaper will be up to the task.
 
A64 x2 2ghz+ dual core, with ATI 2600 Pro (vid card for HD accelertion with HD/Blu-Ray) x2 CPU will do decoding for all other video types, and will be fine.
 
As long as you have a graphics card which accelerates Hi-def HD-DVD / Blu-ray formats (8500, 8600, 8800GT, 8800GTS512 for WinXP and Vista, 2400, 2600, 3850, 3870 for vista only) then any dual core will do.

I have never had either of my HTPCs need to speed up from 1ghz to play any hi-def disk.
 
Should be looking at the cheaper 3650 cards anyway. Also 2600xt worked fine for me in Vista.
 
No, I'm NOT using Vista! I'm on XP. Was wanting a fanless graphs card really. I'm sure everyone was raving about one not so long back that was only about £50-£60 and good for HD playback but I can't find it now.
 
stephentw said:
No, I'm NOT using Vista! I'm on XP. Was wanting a fanless graphs card really. I'm sure everyone was raving about one not so long back that was only about £50-£60 and good for HD playback but I can't find it now.
Click to expand...

Sorry, i mean worked fine for me in XP.
 
Hd acceleration on ATI cards must be supported by the software. Until recently most didnt.

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd2600/radeonhd2600pro/index.html

I dount if i was a known issue, AMD would continue to advertise it. Remember with the 2900xt where they quickly corrected advertising.

Also, dont understand why the 2600xt will support it and not the 2600pro since they are the same core.

edit: is there any review which actually says this? Anandtech and HardOCP tested on Vista x86 and hardocp said at the time it didnt work on Vista x64, but no mention of XP.
 
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