htpc dilemma

[slag]

i rescued a complete emachines computer sans hard drive from the trash yesterday. Celeron D 2.4? ghz chip, 2 gb of memory, onboard vga and lan and audio. It has a pcie slot also. My current but loud htpc is in a huge case, atx board, and a c2d @ 2 ghz. I'm wanting to pull the radeon 4350 out of my htpc and put it in this celeron setup along with the tb hard drive. Think it will hold its own, or will it be stupidly slow? I watch blueray right now with my current htpc and it does fine as well as timeshift TV and listen to music with WMC.

The chip will overclock to around 2.8 ghz if that would make any difference. I really want to do this because of the much smaller form factor and much quieter fans.

 

[Chapbass]

Someone else confirm this, but a celeron chip witha 4350 probably wont handle bluray....MAYBE with a higher graphics card to offload more work (dont the 45xx and 46xx stuff do more work than the 4300? I'm a little out of the htpc market).

You can always try it, but iiiimmm not too sure thatll work out smoothly.

 

[kalrith]

I don't know if that chip has enough power even with a 4550 or 4670, which would offload as much as possible. The typical recommendation is at the very least a dual-core processor. You could definitely try it out and see if it works, but you'd probably be better suited by buying a SFF case and quieter fans for your current system.

 

[slag]

I thought I read on anandtech where the radeon 3xxx series and above did 100% decoding of h.264 processing which meant no load on the cpu for h.264. H.264 is most popular for its use on Blu-ray Disc, and HD-DVD.

So, if the gpu is doing all the blue ray decoding, then what is there to bog down the cpu?

 

[slag]

I lucked out. its a conroe L core designed celeron that does pretty well in WMC.