HD spec PC sempron / GPU ???

andrewison

Any opinions , I am looking for a PC which would play 1080 HD stuff on PC . I have seen a few deals and thought would a Sempron 3.0 Ghz be able to do the job , or is it all dependant on the GPU. Has anyone here use a 3.0 Ghz Sempron / Celeron for HD playback. Be interested. Any one got any idea for a cheap card for the HD play back as well. I suspect min 256MB card , but is the clock speed Mega important. Just a few questions I would be interested in ...

reason I am asking is dell doing the £90 off and could get one sub £200 ish .

Cheers chaps in advance

superscaper

I assume you mean sempron 3000 which is not 3GHz, it's only 1.8 GHz and personally I'd avoid all semprons and celerons as they are cut down versions of AMDs and Intels cpus and are not fast or efficient for their clock speed.

andrewison

Sorry yeah that what I mean , I know they are cut down , lower cache etc .. but looking at a real cheap media centre thingy , have an xbox running XBMC but nice to have a cheapo PC which is capable of running HD stuff ...

Any suggestion of minimum spec which someone has out there for HD stuff would be well appraicated ...

cheers for the reply tho

Blacksheep1979

For actual hd encoded stuff (rather than just high res) you need a fairly high spec computer - a sempron or celeron won't be nearly powerful enough. You are going to need something like a high end A64, X2 or a core II duo with at least 1gb of ram. Certain graphics cards will also help. What sort of budget are you looking at?

As for the amount of memory on the graphics card it can be a sales ploy. Low end graphics cards with 256mb of memory will perform no better than some of their counterparts with only 128mb ram.

You do get what you pay for and as an example a friend with an fx-55 cpu finds that it can have up to 60% usage whilst viewing a 1080p hd trailer.

You aren't going to get a PC capable of playing full HD stuff for anywhere near £200.

ReadyBet

Don't know much about the specs needed for HD playback but I would have though what you have discribed would be capable. Where are you getting the HD source from?

andrewison

I mean I can get a processor like this but this just adds £40 to the cost .

imension C521 AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200 (2.00Ghz, 512K
Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005.

I have a athlon 3000 at mo , but that struggles with HD 1080 and was okish @ 720 (but not anymore) .

I just want to utilise the HD TV i have ..sad I know ...

andrewison

I have 2 sources , a VGA connector on back of TV (which most likely wont work for HD, I assume not) and a HDMI connector from the DVI output on PC .

Blacksheep1979

even a 3200 will be pushing it for 1080p tbh - does your TV display a 1080p signal?

andrewison

yes a full 1080p

Main reason why I brought it TBH , tho only ever played 720 HD stuff on it via PC

Blacksheep1979

I think the best way forward would be a low end core II duo - E6300. A A64 3500 would probably be a min on the A64 side. As for the graphics card side nVidia 6xxx/7xxx or the ATi 1xxx cards have onboard hd decoding - have a look at toms hardware for more info and reviews

http://www.google.co.uk/url?q=http://www.tomshardware.com/graphics/&sa=X&oi=smap&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&usg=__ojOC9jlU3cBpJL1iWQfkzY-TyOM=

andrewison

Yeah .. this project was so it could take advantage of some cheap deals from Dell ...maybe this might not get off the ground. Well nothing ventured , nothing gained.