HTPC playback problems - upgrade time?

[matt_fsr]

I've a lovely little HTPC at home, which is getting on a bit now and is starting to have a few minor issues, the most annoying of which is that it sometimes 'lags' when playing back some high-def video... i.e. it just isn't smooth, as though it can't quite play back the frames fast enough.

The CPU is an AMD Athlon X2 4050e (low power) and so is probably fine, but the graphics is handled by the onboard Nvidia 8200 graphics, from this Asus motherboard:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M3N78VM/

Is it time for an upgraded board to better handle today's video file sizes? (I say board in preference to adding a dedicated GPU, as my case is only 53mm high. Yes, 53mm. And I want to keep the case.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree, and should be looking more at driver / software configuration? It seems to occur whichever media player I use, but this board has never been fully happy with its' graphics driver ever since it was upgraded to Win7.

I've tried rebuilding it, but it never seems to be fully certain of whether it wants the Nvidia NForce chipset driver to drive the graphics, or the GeForce drivers from the Nvidia website... I'm not even convinced that Nvidia themselves know for sure!

 

[longplay]

My HTPC runs a 5050e (though on a 980G chipset with HD4500 graphics) and I've been installing Windows 8 on it over the last couple of days so have been playing around getting it set up again. Still struggling with sound sync in VC-1 from MKV for some reason (worked fine under Win 7).

Anyway, might be worth looking at a new codec to see if that provides any better experience.