Conroe Core 2 Duo performance with HD/ 4k

[Indus]

If someone is still using Conroe C2D.. how has your experience been with HD and 4k video playbacks? Does it stutter or its perfect like say Haswell?

 

[Raduque]

I never did 4k, but I had no issues with 1080p h264 l4 high at 10 mbps on a Conroe e6300 1.86ghz.

 

[daveybrat]

If you're using onboard Intel graphics from that era it will be a slideshow. But if you add a newer low end video card that can offload some of the video to the GPU it should be fine.

My computer at work couldn't play a youtube video at 1080P without massive stuttering on a 2.9GHz C2D with onboard graphics. Added a AMD Radeon HD6450 card and it can now play it fine.

 

[SPBHM]

I can run some 30FPS 1080P youtube VP9 videos on a 2GHz C2D with GMA 950 kind of OK (with a 1080P screen), it drops a few frames but not to bad,

 

[Zodiark1593]

VP9 on Youtube has been awful as far as cpu use goes (and by extension, outright murderous on laptop batteries), as there are very few hardware decoders available. I'm bordering on calling Google ***holes for a rather strongarm method instead of including an option for h.264 (in their html5 player), however, VP9 as an open source and royalty free competitor to HEVC is a major plus.

That said, my i5-460M in my laptop averages roughly 40-50% cpu usage with full screen 1080P VP9. While the already weak (aged) battery life is completely abyssmal in Youtube now, I'm quite glad to see that cpu aged pretty well.

 

[SPBHM]

VP9 on Youtube has been awful as far as cpu use goes (and by extension, outright murderous on laptop batteries), as there are very few hardware decoders available. I'm bordering on calling Google ***holes for a rather strongarm method instead of including an option for h.264 (in their html5 player), however, VP9 as an open source and royalty free competitor to HEVC is a major plus.

That said, my i5-460M in my laptop averages roughly 40-50% cpu usage with full screen 1080P VP9. While the already weak (aged) battery life is completely abyssmal in Youtube now, I'm quite glad to see that cpu aged pretty well.

chrome forces vp9 but there is an extension called h264ify which forces h264 and hardware acceleration should work fine, the downside is not supporting 4K and so on,

 

[leper84]

I was just using my backup e7500 setup a week ago and any HD was a no-go for me with integrated graphics. Same chip I remember adding a gts250 years ago and being fine for 1080p.

 

[escrow4]

Doubt it. A G1820 is $50 and can play back 4K (~60% CPU usage on my G1850) and 1080p no issues. 1080p/60 in Chrome YouTube is twitchy. All on the onboard iGPU.

 

[Torn Mind]

Core 2 Duos cannot handle 1080p without a GPU The university of maryland had E8400 Dells maybe three years ago. Playing HD video is a no-go. 4k is a pipe dream without a GPU.

 

[SPBHM]

Core 2 Duos cannot handle 1080p without a GPU The university of maryland had E8400 Dells maybe three years ago. Playing HD video is a no-go. 4k is a pipe dream without a GPU.

e8400 should run 1080P quite fine
my t7200 (2GHz 65nm C2D with FSB166) with a GMA 950 plays youtube vp9 1080P/24 without dropping frames, and 1080P/30 dropping some frames (but it's not to horrible, it's possible to watch), that's using Chome on Ubuntu.

something like an e6600 should handle 1080P30 VP9 youtube well enough.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Here's hoping that AMD or NV realizes a market for a sub-$100, passively-cooled, low-profile ready (for the SFF OEM cases) video card with all the newest codecs hardware-supported, and with an HDMI 2.0 port on it.

Think updated 5450, with newer codec support and HDMI 2.0. I think that it would be a hot seller into the upgrade / refurb market. Heck, possibly many of the retail refurb resellers would pre-install one of these cards, since the outdated GMA graphics on many of the older refurbs barely accelerates a web browser these days.

 

[SuperJaw]

I was using a dual socket Mac Pro from 2008 with 2 2.8Ghz Quads. It's time had definitely passed. It still had pretty good brute for for heavy lifting but it was not snappy and had slow downs where there shouldn't have been. (I was running a 6870GPU).

Running a Skylake i3 with 530 graphics feels way faster in lighter desktop web browser type usage and almost matches it in video encode.

Core2 isn't quite as bad if you can run a semi modern GPU like the 750ti and a SSD. But it's time has passed even though it's compute power was pretty decent. The platform is just to old (slow RAM etc).

 

[skipsneeky2]

Had a E5200+9500gt that ran 1080 p Youtube just fine.My wifes G1820+GT 740 is just as flawless.

I didn't even bother to try the onboard on the G1820,GT 740 is a good match for that cpu for the light games she plays.

 

[dark zero]

Core 2 and pre Llano/Phenom II AMD reached to their end of life. Is better to move to Haswell or Skylake or even AMD FX.

That kind of processing is now heavy for those processors.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Core 2 works fine with fullHD in my experience.

4K H265 will be a disaster though, but it should run fine if you put a gpu in it that can decode it like a gtx950.

 

[Spjut]

I tried some HEVC 720p, 1080p and 4k samples on my E6600 at stock speed (CPU only, GT 610 doesn't support partial acceleration).
720p almost ran fine all the time, 1080p wasn't good at all, and 4k was a slideshow.

 

[Grooveriding]

There is always the mod to use Harpertown Xeons on the chipset platforms that supported Core 2 chips. That brings a big performance improvement from 2 more cores, 45nm giving a better overclock and some architecture/cache improvements.

Before I built my NAS I had an old e6400 sitting in a box with a bunch of 2TB drives sitting in it with our media. It was having troubles with transcoding as a Plex server. I did the mod to the motherboard/chip and put an X5460 in there, overclocked it to 3.8ghz and all the problems were resolved. It's about a $40 investment picking up a chip and the 771 to 775 adapter from ebay.