What upgrade shall i do for my media pc?

Colbaker · 24 Nov 2008 at 12:15

Hi all,

My current Media PC is

Antec Fusion 430 case/PSU
intel Core2Duo E4500 S775 2.2ghz 2MB (stock cooler)
Corsair 2x1GB 240DIMM XMS2-6400 CL4
Gigabyte S775 nForce 630I MATX DDR2 ALG
ATI Radeon HD3450 512mb PCI Express Graphics
2 x 1tb Samsung spinpoint F1 drives
Pioneer Blu Ray Player
Windows Vista 32bit

I use the Pc for watching Blu Ray disks, listening to music and watchin a lot of .mkv files but it does sometimes seem to struggle with Blu Ray so i was wondering if it would be worth upgrading anything, I only want to spend about £70 though, Should i upgrade the memory to 4gb (i do have an copy of Windows Vista 64bit i have not used), Should i improve the cooling and overclock the whole system including the graphics card?

What do you think?

Participant · 24 Nov 2008 at 12:24

For £70 you should be able to get another 2GB of RAM and after you sell your video card, a better GPU, perhaps second hand. I would definitely go down the route of 4GB + x64.

Colbaker · 24 Nov 2008 at 12:55

Thanks for the reply, The only problem is that im sure i read somewhere that x64 Vista has compatibilty issues with .MKV file's does anyone else know about this.

Also do you think it is really worth me upgrading the video card as i have only just got it and the wife would be none to pleased if i then sell it (i know it is not much money but trying to buy anything new for the pc is like pulling teeth).

So do you think it would be enough just to buy 4gb memory and a couple of new coolers (cpu and GPU) then do a little overclock?

feriso · 24 Nov 2008 at 16:35

I dunno why you have trouble with bluray, my htpc eats it for breakfast, same with mkv files. Are you sure you are using hardware decoding? (i.e. offload it to gfx card?)

edit : are you using powerdvd8 for watching blurays?

Colbaker · 25 Nov 2008 at 10:29

Nope im using Powerdvd 7.3 to watch the Blu ray dvd's, Do you think i should upgrade?

MKV files play fine though.

feriso · 25 Nov 2008 at 10:33

PDVD7 should still work OK, have you got the hardware acceleration tab checked in both PDVD options and in catalyst (under Windows Media Acceleration ) or something similar

You shouldn't be having any problems watching any blurays with your system.

If you still have problems it might be worthwhile using graphedit (or studio) to see what codecs are being used