How fast for DVD?

[mally]

Ihave an older k6/2 300 that I know is not fast enough to run dvd w/o a hardware decoder.

How fast would I have to upgrade to in order run smoothly?

thanks

 

[ncg]

Depends on your video card, as well as your processor. For instance, you are probably ok if you are using an ATI All-in-Wonder card. But, to answer your question, a 500 mhz processor should do well enough.

 

[mally]

my video card is a tnt2 ultra 32mb. I've tried before with my 300 and had terrible quality but I won't have the cash for a full system upgrade for a couple of more months and I'm out of pci slots so I don't have room for a decoder

so I was thinking about upgrading my processor (a k62 450-500) for about $60 or $70 to tide me over for the time being.

 

[the FooL]

Someone on the FS forum was selling the 450 and 500's for cheaper than that.
Not sure if it was a K6-2 or K6-3, but might be a cheaper upgrade path.

A friend of mine is currently running his DVD player on
an AMD K6-2 350, and it's working fine (it was my old system except for the video card).
He has the ATI Rage 128 chipset, which has some decent DVD features.
He's a film buff, and he's been using it to watch DVD's all the time.

I saw Fight Club on that thing, and I didn't notice any glaring problems.

I ran a DVD player on a celery 450 (the infamous 300a), and didn't have any problems either. My G200 video card didn't have any DVD features (since Matrox couldn't get it to work with my SCSI DVD drive).

You could get a decent Duron that can oc to 900 for that price, so if you can live with it, just save it for the future upgrade.

what software are you using?

 

[RoadRuner]

spend $50 and get a dvd-decoder card. cheapest path, includes tv-outs etc.

or just spend $99 and get yourself a nice apex vcd/cd/dvd player at circuitcity.

so much easier than dragging your pc to the tv screen