CPU for 1080p

Chicken legs · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:03

Im looking to make a pc able to play HD movies etc in 1080p to display them on my HD screen, my pc atm cant run them properly, its a amd athlon 64 3200+, very jerky & pausing all the time. My question is what is the minimum spec cpu i need to be able to smoothly play HD movies at 1080p ? will the spec of the ram/graphics card be important as well ? thanks.

james.miller · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:07

minimum spec is a dual core. the minimum you'll get away with i believe is a 3800+ dual core. faster is obviously better, the c2d's plough through hd video. cpu usage watching a hd-dvd peaks at around 30% on my pc

Chicken legs · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:16

Hi james, so you reckon a amd athlon X2 dual core 3800+ is the minimum, they look quite cheap so thats good, even the 6000+ is not a bad price. What speed core 2 duo's do you have, & do you watch HD at 1080p ? What about ram & graphics cards ?

gurusan · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:30

I would get a e6400 or a 4600+ or 5000+ for watching 1080p...

Or you could get an e6300 and just do a mild overclock to 2.4-2.8ghz which it should do on stock vcore.

lee87 · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:31

A X2 3800+ will be fine for playing HD videos. I have that cpu at stock speeds and when playing 1080p videos the cpu usage stays between 30-35%.

Using 1GB DDR400 ram and a X1800XT graphics card. Not sure if these make a difference to HD playback.

james.miller · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:32

yeah. depending on the price get the best one you can justify, bear in mind with a bit of an overclock any of them would be fine.

As for me, ive got an e6600 @ 3.2ghz, 2gb ram. i watch full 1080p hd-dvd material on a sony 1080p lcd tv. graphics card is in the sig - an 8800gtx, but that doesnt make a huge difference tbh.

lee87 said:
A X2 3800+ will be fine for playing HD videos. I have that cpu at stock speeds and when playing 1080p videos the cpu usage stays between 30-35%.

what 1080p videos? the vc1 used on bluray and hd-dvd is quite a bit more cpu intensive than quicktime for example

lee87 · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:36

james.miller said:
what 1080p videos? the vc1 used on bluray and hd-dvd is quite a bit more cpu intensive than quicktime for example

The 1080p HD videos on the Windows HD website.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

Chicken legs · 16 Apr 2007 at 12:39

Thanks for the replys, so the graphics card & ram dont make that much diffrence then, would onboard graphics be ok ? I would be playing .ts or .mkv files on VLC player to my Sony HD 55" screen.

lsg1r · 16 Apr 2007 at 13:05

obviously it depends on codec and the player, I have played h.264 res video on my pc using quicktime, nero, powerdvd and wmp (with codec) and quicktime is a lot more cpu intensive than the others. powerdvd appeared to be the best option in terms of cpu usage but it does use the gpu to help with decoding. WMV HD is less cpu intensive than h.264 in my view too, although its the otherway round with a mac

Most modern cpu's have drivers/software that makes use of them when playing video's. Using purevideo on an opteron 175 (stock) with onboard 6150 graphics reduces the cpu load, the same would happen with an avivo ati card. My opteron 175 hit about 25% load.

As to cpu I would say a 3800+ would be fine although it would run at a higher usage than some others, integrated graphics (well any semi decent one) should be fine.

Can't say much about ram but I do have 4gigs

benktlottie · 16 Apr 2007 at 13:45

james.miller said:
minimum spec is a dual core. the minimum you'll get away with i believe is a 3800+ dual core. faster is obviously better, the c2d's plough through hd video. cpu usage watching a hd-dvd peaks at around 30% on my pc

I would disagree. Dual core is not a necessity as it is unlikely that you will be doing other processing while you watch a movie! The recommended min spec for a processor is a P4 3.0ghz chip!!! I have personally seen a San Diego 3700+ run HD smooth as mate. I do agree with the statement of the faster the better though.

Seft · 16 Apr 2007 at 13:51

benktlottie said:
I would disagree. Dual core is not a necessity as it is unlikely that you will be doing other processing while you watch a movie! The recommended min spec for a processor is a P4 2.4ghz chip!!! I have personally seen a San Diego 3700+ run HD smooth as mate. I do agree with the statement of the faster the better though.

I'm with the dual core camp. A lot of decoders are multithreaded. Whilst you have seen HD in a relatively unintensive codec (MPEG2, WMVHD or even MPEG4) running on a SD3700, you would have real difficulty playing back H.264 or VC1 videos (I have observed this with friends who have San Diegos).

Cyber-Mav · 16 Apr 2007 at 13:53

is windows media player multi threadded?

Chicken legs · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:18

Can anyone tell me how much ram im gonna need & if it matters a great deal if i just get cheap value ram as im on a budget ?

james.miller · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:27

benktlottie said:
I would disagree. Dual core is not a necessity as it is unlikely that you will be doing other processing while you watch a movie! The recommended min spec for a processor is a P4 3.0ghz chip!!! I have personally seen a San Diego 3700+ run HD smooth as mate. I do agree with the statement of the faster the better though.

well you havent played vc1 have you? i'm talking about full bandwidth 30mb/sec 1080p material with mutli channel audio to match. I'm not disagreeing that you can play clips downloaded off the net, but that isnt anything compared to the real deal

Chicken legs said:
Can anyone tell me how much ram im gonna need & if it matters a great deal if i just get cheap value ram as im on a budget ?

ram makes little difference, but obviously get the most you can afford. 1gb is the minimum id recommend to anybody these days

graphics cards make little difference if you've got the cpu to do the job, squiffy quite successfully plays 1080p material using an onboard nvidia 6xxx i believe

cokecan · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:27

ive been wondering about this same thing also

i was plannin on using a e6300 at stock for now just to play back hd-dvd's at 720p till i can afford a 1080p screen. would this be up to the job without overclocking?

gurusan · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:28

Cyber-Mav said:
is windows media player multi threadded?

not that I know of but it's kind of irrelevant I think, as it depends if the decoder is mulithreaded or not.

cokecan72 said:
ive been wondering about this same thing also

i was plannin on using a e6300 at stock for now just to play back hd-dvd's at 720p till i can afford a 1080p screen. would this be up to the job without overclocking?

I would imagine it would do fine, but setting the FSB to 333 would give you a mild overclock, most likely stable....

Metallifux · 16 Apr 2007 at 14:43

If you are wanting to play 1080p mkv's then you need the core avc x.264 codec, nothing comes close to it for speed. My X2 4200+ munches through them peaking at about 40% cpu usage.

Dingleberry88 · 16 Apr 2007 at 16:23

Chicken legs said:
athlon 64 3200+, very jerky & pausing all the time

My (overclocked) A643200 could play 1080p ok, as long as I didn't have too many other things running.

I definately wouldn't say dual core was a minimum.

Dogoid · 16 Apr 2007 at 17:13

my old athlon barton 2800 could play wmv 1080p smooth , but there is a trick, you got to enable agp fastwrite in the bios and in your video card drivers.

for me on the above chip struggled like a mule until i changed this.

Smeg4Brains · 16 Apr 2007 at 18:45

Seft said:
I'm with the dual core camp. A lot of decoders are multithreaded. Whilst you have seen HD in a relatively unintensive codec (MPEG2, WMVHD or even MPEG4) running on a SD3700, you would have real difficulty playing back H.264 or VC1 videos (I have observed this with friends who have San Diegos).

i suppose that's why this old 3200+ has no problem playing back h264/1080p/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray then :rolleyes:

Just use a good nvidia card + pdvd hd edition and your away, all this needing dual core is nonsense.