DivX playing: Which upgrade to make on a celeron 500?

[aakerman]

My brother has a celeron 500mhz, with 64 mb ram, some asus motherboard, and apparently an "Asus Mew-2.1" video card...

He wants to be able to run divx from that computer, to the television in the next room, and wants to know which upgrades are required, for the computer to run/display the movies smoothly, that is without choppiness and such.

Any help would be much appreciated..

 

[Nefrodite]

depends on the resolution of the input divx, higher the divx the harder it is. also depends on output quality setting u want, theres a slider celly 500 is bad because of its 66mhz bus, so it might be ur bottle neck.

my guess is your brother isn't paying for movies is he?

 

[aakerman]

some he is... he has bought a lot of dvds, and he and his wife rent like 3-4 movies every week,
it gets expensive pretty fast...

it's going to be standard resolution, 640*352 i think....
some other guy told me that i only needed more ram???

 

[aakerman]

HMM! I've just tried running a standard 2hour movie on the computer, and at first it was somewhat choppy - but viewable, I'd say around 10 frames per second..
Then i entered the decoder config, and set quality to minimum, and checked out "smooth playback" - after that, it ran (to me) completely smooth..

I don't know how much the video card has to do with decoding the movie, but if I were to buy a GF4 Ti4200 with tv-out, shouldn't that guarantee
smooth playback, even with medium quality?

or is the decoding done 100% by the CPU?

 

[UlricT]

I don't think that RAM alone will solve your problems. I read in some review that divx decoding takes up 80-90% power of a Duron 650. In fact, i'lll look for the link on the review. The review is on a Hardware divx decoder, maybe you should check it out....

The article is up at Toms hardware guide. Here is the link: http://www6.tomshardware.com/video/02q2/020621/index.html

Hope it helps... looks like this card is all your brother needs.

 

[UlricT]

The decoding was done 100% by the CPU traditionally.... I do not think the GeForce line of cards or even the other newer video cards have support for divx decoding in hardware.

 

[Zugzwang152]

yeah, the cpu usually does all the decoding, except if you buy a separate PCI decoder. 500 Mhz is a bit below the 700-800 that is generally recommended for high quality problem-free playback, but if you set the quality down a bit, you should be fine. spankyOO7 apparently got his divx box running on a 300Mhz P-II, so.....

 

[spanky]

yes i did..... what really made a world of difference in my divx box was upgrading my video card. at first i had an 8mb pci ati all in wonder. divx playback with that card was rather...umm... bad. it was pause like every 3 seconds. then i picked up one of thos 32mb pci radeon's from hot deals for $30... made all the difference in the world

 

[aakerman]

SPANKY! =) Please explain to me, how it's possible that your purchase of a newer graphics card, made a difference!?! - because everyone is saying that the video
card doesn't do any decoding at all!

right now i'm contemplating one of three things..

1) getting a geforce4, hoping it would rid me of choppiness
2) buying the sigma xcard, a pci-card mpeg4 decoder, only available through mailorder from USA though
3) upgrading my celeron 500, but it I can't find the specs for my ASUS MEW-VM motherboard anywhere, so I don't know if it supports higher clock speeds!

 

[SocrPlyr]

the video card still has to be capable of displaying whatever the rest of the computer is putting to it... and if it isn't then it is choppy... if your vid card can't handle it then it doesn't matter how fast the rest of the rig is if the card can't output that fast the images it is getting...
in reality my suggestion for the rig would be an 800Mhz processor and a radeon or geforce anything...

Josh

 

[aakerman]

then i'd have to upgrade the motherboard too... not worth it 8()

if I can't solve my problems by going all-out on a radeon 8500, or GF4 Ti4400, then I think
I'm gonna order home one of those Xcards..

 

[randomlinh]

400/450 mhz used to be the bottom line for divx playback w/ an ok video card... that's what i remember... and know cause my siblings 450 (altho 100mhz fsb) machines do divx just fine and dandy (not tv out tho.. wouldn't think that would take a hit). My friend has a tnt w/ tv out on a 500mhz celeron (66mhz fsb, and its HP ), and didn't have too many problems w/ 64MB of ram (has 128 now tho). Uses it to watch divx all the time on his tv.

Linh

 

[TheWart]

another vote to get the Sigma Designs Xcard...looks like it would be all your system needs, plus you can use it for tv-out.

 

[spanky]

SocrPlyr summed it up pretty well. as for my divx box... i put win98 (tho someday i want to get 2000 on) and only win98. it does nothing else except divx. i think that my divx box (its a compaq) actually runs at 66mhz fsb. i never really took the time to investigate. i think the cel500 should be fine, as long as u do not pair it with a crap video card. if anyway, try to run ur cpu at a higher fsb w/ lower multiplier... like 100mhz fsb @ 5x. but first things first... try to get some more ram.

 

[aakerman]

hmm... my brother decided to buy a whole new computer instead, so I got excactly the one
they recommend @ sharkyextremes value pc guide, except for the casing...