Is the machine up to it?

Mattw · 27 Apr 2008 at 14:52

I have a shuttle SN41G2 barebones lieing around with an AMD athlon 2500+ and 512MB Pc3200 ram, its using the onboard geforce 4 at the moment but is missing a hard drive.

Would this machine, perhaps with a better graphics card be able to handle playing HD media, essentially becoming my media centre?

Thanks

Wiggins · 27 Apr 2008 at 15:14

The motherboard only supports 4x AGP but all is not lost. Something along the lines of a passive cooled 7600GS might do it.

They retail now at between £30 - £40.

closeratio · 27 Apr 2008 at 15:35

Didn't Ati release their new 3XXX series with a line of AGP-based cards, as well as Pci-e?

Saying that though, they might only support AGP 8x

Andre · 27 Apr 2008 at 17:24

Got one with XP 2500+, 1GB RAM and an ATI 9250 in it, running (x264) HD content fine (only 720p, mind) Struggles with 1080p, drops to about 15fps so unwatchable - but I just run it on my main machine and re-encode down to 720

Mattw · 1 May 2008 at 07:57

I wonder if a better graphics card would deal with 1080p then, is it the graphics card that would make the difference?

Andre · 1 May 2008 at 08:34

Well as my screen res is only 1366x768, so a lot of re-size goes on for 1080p on my likkle box - I have no way of checking (sorry.) I do have a ati 9700 sat in a drawer, just it is not passive so too noisy.

Allegedly, using one of the ati HD cards should allow the offload of the decoding to them - but mine runs fine as it is, only hitting 90+% CPU on 1080p content (MediaCentre using CoreAVC for (h/x)264 and ffdshow for everything else)