EdW Posted January 5, 2005 Posted January 5, 2005 Having had the opportunity to watch some of the HDTV broadcasts on Astra using a dedicated set-top box, I am keen to upgrade my SkyStar 2/DVBViewer PC configuration to operate with the growing number of these broadcasts. I would like to reuse as much of my present technology as possible but will rebuild into a new quiet case (Antec Overture): Pentium III 1GHz processor Soltek Motherboard 512GBytes SDRAM (PC133) Samsung IDE HDDs (80 + 120GBytes) Asus ATI 9600SE graphics card (DVI+VGA+TV out) Audigy Platinum Ex Sound Card SkyStar2 (D link IEEE 802.11G & USB 2.0 card) Will the 9600SE be suffiecient to allow me to get away without changing the motherboard, CPU and RAM? Does the Forum include a simple 'All you need to do to make HDTV work' section? Thanks for your help Quote
kardzali Posted January 5, 2005 Posted January 5, 2005 Most DVB card manufacturers recommend that you have at least a 1.6 Ghz CPU for HDTV. That seems to be the minimum. The graphics card can help a bit but you still need processing power for the software MPEG decoder. Upgrading your motherboard and processor is recommended. They're not that expensive and you can probably snap up one cheap from someone who upgrades their PC every 3 months. The faster the better... Cheers, Daniel Quote
Klausing Posted January 5, 2005 Posted January 5, 2005 I have a geforce 6600 and with an Pentium 3,2 Ghz i get a CPU usage for HDTV (with Nvidia codec and hardware acceleration) nearly 15%. So 1GHz with the rigth grafic card should be enough. Quote
EdW Posted January 7, 2005 Author Posted January 7, 2005 Thanks for your encouragement - in the end it was VERY easy The Task Manager suggests that decoding Astra HD requires about 60 - 70% of the CPU performance. There are some hesitations in the pictures quite often but since it's for demo purposes it's not so bad! Any furhter suggestions for fine tuning of performance or do I simply have to save up to upgrade (this means the Motherboard/Processor and RAM of course? Thanks again, Quote
kardzali Posted January 8, 2005 Posted January 8, 2005 Reduce the amount of programs running in the background, check the BIOS settings for improved performance, defrag the hard drive, clean the registry from invalid entries... These should help.... Cheers, Daniel Quote
boborg Posted January 8, 2005 Posted January 8, 2005 (edited) Well I've found that a new video card not necessarily is better. I've exchanged my old Ati 8500 for a MSI 6600GT. I use Nvidia dvd decoder 1.00.67 codec and hardware acceleration but really have not seen improvement in HDTV playback. Camera panning is not smooth. CPU load on my 2.40 GhZ Pentium 4 is about 40-45 %. Edited January 8, 2005 by boborg Quote
kardzali Posted January 8, 2005 Posted January 8, 2005 If you have the money an Ultra 160 SCSI hard disk (or even higher spec) would speed up things a lot more... What I have found is plenty of RAM does help a lot especially when the processor isn't as fast as it should be. Cheers, Daniel Quote
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