Can E4300 handle HD Playback? * NO Overclocking *

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by mbahr

My new pc came. They had upgraded it from an e4300 to an e6300. The x3000 on the MB does not have enough power for Sage. In fact I have to set Sage to use the basic renderer to get anything to work.

I'll keep tweaking and see what else is up.

The X3000 works fine for HD playback. You just cant use the Sage MPEG decoder, but something like powerdvd that uses the GMA3000 hardware assist.

Oh yeah, it doesn't work right under Vista.

Thanks,
mike

[bhyman1]

I got my newer rig all set up.

Just to recap it's an E4400, 2 gigs of RAM, Windows XP, Intel G33 chipset motherboard with the X3000 GPU built in, and I'm using the Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra Deluxe 7.3 codec.

I did a test recording of King of Queens off of CBS (via HDHomerun) to test 1080i playback. It works great.

Just to note, I initially tried the Purevideo codec and playback stuttered every few seconds. The Cyberlink codec supports the Intel Video chipset so I went with that ($10 off of Ebay) and everything started to work beautifully.

CPU usage hovers between 20% and 30% when playing back HD. So an e4300 should be just fine.

[bhyman1]

Originally Posted by mbahr

My new pc came. They had upgraded it from an e4300 to an e6300. The x3000 on the MB does not have enough power for Sage. In fact I have to set Sage to use the basic renderer to get anything to work.

I'll keep tweaking and see what else is up.

Then there's something wrong. Mine works great. Go to Intel's website and get the latest video card driver.

[mbahr]

That's a good suggestion... I'll download the latest Intel drivers.

I'm using the sage client to watch the HD content. How do I use PowerDVD or something else like that in lieue of the sage client?

-Mike

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by mbahr

That's a good suggestion... I'll download the latest Intel drivers.

I'm using the sage client to watch the HD content. How do I use PowerDVD or something else like that in lieue of the sage client?

-Mike

This question comes up all the time. the MPEG2 codec that comes with Sage is a certifiable POS. It does NO hardware acceleration of any kind. It's worthless.

So for HD you really have to use something like powerdvd, purevideo, etc...

Why sage continues to do this instead of bundling something like the cyberlink codec is amazing to me. It's bundled with $20 DVD burners, so it can't be that expensive! This causes tons of user issues. They should just do it.

thanks,
mike

[bhyman1]

Originally Posted by mbahr

That's a good suggestion... I'll download the latest Intel drivers.

I'm using the sage client to watch the HD content. How do I use PowerDVD or something else like that in lieue of the sage client?

-Mike

You won't use PowerDVD in place of Sage to play back content. You just need the codec. So after you install PowerDVD and get rid of the Purevideo codec Power DVD should be the default codec and Sage can use it to render the content.

[KarylFStein]

As far as I know, only the Cyberlink (PowerDVD) and Intervideo (WinDVD) decoders make use of the Intel "Clear Video" hooks. I have the nVidia PureVideo decoders and they didn't work, but I haven't tried them in a while. Also, I had to use Overlay instead of VMR9 or else there were some skips in playback and button presses were not as response. I really couldn't tell the difference between the two quality-wise except that I liked the transparent menus with VMR9.

[btrcp2000]

Karylfstein just hit on something i was wondering last night. What's the difference between overlay and vmr 9 beyond the menu transparency? I think I prefer the little window in the corner anyway, so is there anything else I should care about?

Reason i ask is upon my first install, i get stuttering with vmr enabled, but nothing with overlay.

Specs should be okay, or so I thought:

gigabyte ds3
e4300 not overclocked
2gb ram
vista biz
8500gt
500gb hd

also got a weird message about aero being disabled, i assume that was connected with my toggling of overlay. Have not messed with any codecs yet, i guess that's next on the list.