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Add Blu Ray Burner to Dell Dim 4600C?

K

klod

Senior member
I've been asked to do this for someone else. Does anyone know if this is possible? The 4600C looks to have SATA, but the power supply is only 160 watts.

Thanks!
 
I'm not sure that there's enough horse power in that thing to play back blu ray smoothly. It has a single core Pentium 4 processor, but those ran a wide range of clock speeds. The faster ones should give you no problems playing back blu ray, but the slower ones... well, they look really slow. I don't know how they would compare to an early Atom processor, but early Atom couldn't do full HD video...

I'm no expert here, but I assume if you can find a Blu Ray that will fit in the case, you can replace the DVD Drive it comes with with the Blu Ray. There's only one SATA on the board, but according to the manual, the thing uses IDE connectors for the DVD and HDD, so it should be free. Given the age of that computer, I doubt that a newer blu ray burner requires more power than the optical that's on it right now.

Here's the Dim 4600C manual:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4600c/en/H72280.pdf
 
philosofool said:
I'm not sure that there's enough horse power in that thing to play back blu ray smoothly.
Click to expand...
If it's a P4 rig, then that's absolutely true. No way to play back blu-ray on a single-core P4 rig. A Pentium-D dual-core might be able to handle it.

Even my overclocked AMD BE-2400 dual-core CPU running at 2.85Ghz couldn't handle smooth Blu-Ray 1080P decoding, running all on the CPU. So there's no way that a P4 could do so.

You might have a chance if you can upgrade your graphics card to something more modern, that could play Blu-Ray.
 
A burner does use more power than a normal DVD-ROM, but it isn't that much more. You will be fine on the PSU. The bigger problem, as others have pointed out is that there is no way that the machine will be able to play back Blu-Ray movies as is.
 
Thanks for the replies.

This pc only has onboard graphics. Even if I installed an AGP card, would the cpu have the guts to play back blu ray, assuming it has the fastest P4 processor installed? I will have to see what processor it actually has. BTW, I also plan to install 2GB of ram.
 
I have dimension 8200, kinda same specs, it cae with 1.7ghz cpu, I upgraded it to 2.4, ram is 1GB. There is no way this think can play Bluray. I have 7500GT @AGP 4x still, it cant even play 720p h264. Its simply not worth it, don't bother.
 
klod said:
This pc only has onboard graphics. Even if I installed an AGP card, would the cpu have the guts to play back blu ray, assuming it has the fastest P4 processor installed? I will have to see what processor it actually has. BTW, I also plan to install 2GB of ram.
Click to expand...

Well, you will need hardware accelerated video decoding to get blu ray play back. The nVidia 6200 doesn't have it. I think you're probably looking at a Radeon 3450 to get that, but the specs on the 3450 say "300W PSU". I'm pretty sure that's an overstatement, but I wouldn't spend $55 for a card that the PSU might not support.

All told, I have to say that it sounds like the idea here is dead. After you pay for a blu ray drive, an AGP card, a new PSU, and RAM, you're investing over $150 in a computer that wasn't a viable machine in 2009. You can get a stand-alone blu ray player at Target for $100.
 
Yeah. Think about building a Zacate rig, if you want to watch blu-ray. Or a decent AMD Athlon II X2 rig with an IGP chipset that also does Blu-Ray decoding (780G, 880G, etc.)
 
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