New HTPC choppy playback

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7 Aug 2005
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358
Im hoping someone can advise.

I bought what I was told would be a HTPC more than capable of handling HD (mostly WMV-HD and MKV) files, however upon playback the files suffer quite badly from choppy and inconsistant playback.

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G Socket AM2+ onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3GHz) Socket AM2 L2 2MB (2 x 1MB)
Coolermaster Silent Pro 500W Modular PSU
4GB (although Vista only displays 3GB) DDR2 ram
SilverStone LASCALA LC17

I admit I purchased an OEM CPU by mistake, usually I would have purchased one with its own cooler and I wonder if this is part of the problem. I am using a AMD heatsink which I have had several years, and would likely have been a stock cooler that would have come with my last A64 chip. I have a Zalman Flower cooler also, but can see no physical way of attaching it.

The case has two external fans, on the mobo I can only see pins for one system fan though so one of the two is redundant.

The OS I am using is the Business version of Vista. I do wonder if it is the OS itself causing the problem, although I also run Vista ultimate on another PC (Intel 6750CPU) which has none of these problems, whether or not the Business version is the issue here or not I cant say yet.

CPU usage isnt that high when I run these files, I cant help but think its a lack of cooling, but any advise would be appreciated as its simply not doing the job at present.
 
if you think it might be the heatsink, check your temperatures with a programme like realtemp.

are all your chipset etc. drivers all the latest and installed properly? was it a fresh vista install?
 
What codecs are you using?

I'm using Media Player classic combined with CoreAVC for 264 files

My cpu is a AMD 4050e and when playing a 13GB MKV file the cpu usage hovers at about 40%
 
Any other programs I can use as realtemp doesnt support my CPU?

I use WMP for WMVs and VLC to play the MKV files. Its more the MKVs I have issues with, but have also seen stuttering on the WMV files. CPU rarely goes above 65% I find, and levels around the 45-50% mark.
 
I have installed the 8.9 Catalyst driver. Thanks for the advice on Coretemp, using that I can see that when running a MKV file the temperature is around the 50C mark for both cores, with a load fluctuating around the 60-80% mark. Are those figures high..?
 
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