HomeA couple of months ago, my 5 year old P4 system started to suffer from graphics corruption problems. As a webmaster of a successful (haha) website, it was not until last week that I had time to properly diagnose the computer and see what was wrong with it. This is the system in question:
P4 3.2 GHz (Northwood)
1 GB DDR-400 RAM
2 x 125 GB SATA HDD (RAID-1)
ATI Radeon 9800 XT
BenQ 17″ (no HDCP, connected via VGA)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
Antec 380W PSU (18A on +12V)
Windows XP Pro SP3
As you can see, what was a top system 5 years ago, is now decidedly old and slow.
Having suspected the power supply may be at fault, I pulled out all the power connections except to the basic component (no HDD, drives, and even case fans) and then booted into the BIOS. Unfortunately the graphics corruption continued, and so I decided that perhaps the graphics card is to blame after all. It could still have been the power supply, but buying a new graphics card is much more exciting than buying a new power supply, and so I was certain it was the graphics card that needed replacing. This PC was no longer going to be used for games, so if I was to find an use for it, then it would be media related work. And so, it made sense to grab a new graphics card that would offer accelerated HD video decoding, so I can turn this 5 year old piece of junk into a Blu-ray player of sorts.
ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro - fast enough for Blu-ray
Unfortunately, trying to find an AGP card for the ageing system was difficult. There were PCIe cards everywhere, but AGP cards numbered less than a dozen, and out of those, only a few were in stock. This is the situation here in Melbourne, Australia, anyway. NVIDIA has firmly given up on AGP cards, and so the ATI cards were the only sensible options. The most popular option right now is the Radeon 3850, which is expensive compared to PCIe equivalents. And I wasn’t sure my PSU was up to the task. There were also a few Radeon 9250/9550”s, but I was not going to downgrade my 9800 XT. Neither the 9250’s, 9550’s nor the X1650 Pro were up to the task of Blu-ray decoding anyway, since they did not support ATI’s UVD feature found in the Radeon HD range. So I wasn’t left with much of an option, and so in the end, I decided on an Sapphire Radeon HD 2400 Pro. It’s not much of a game card, but it’s the cheapest I could find with UVD. Again, this is my local situation, but if you’re in the US, you’ll most likely be able to find a cheap HD 3650 or maybe even a passive cooling card for less than what I paid for.
Anyhoo, installed the card. Was a pain to get rid of the old card, as the AGP latch on motherboard was inaccessible due to the length of my 9800 XT. A very sore and squished thumb later, I got the card out and it was amazing to feel the weight difference between the 9800 XT and the 2400 Pro – the 9800 XT weighed at least 3 times as much! Installed the new card, booted, and graphics corruption problems gone. Installed new drivers, and now comes the fun part: playing HD movies.
The old computer obviously didn’t have a Blu-ray drive built in. I also don’t have a portable Blu-ray drive that I can connect up to the PC, so I used my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive to do the tests, which will work fine as HD DVDs use the same set of video codecs (and sometimes the exact same transfer) as Blu-ray movies. I started up WinDVD 9 and started playing a HD DVD disc (Top Gun). To my horror, the FPS wasn’t much better than before, 10 frames per second at best. This wasn’t right. Further research found me this link to a set of ATI HD Registry Tweaks. Ran the file and rebooted, and started WinDVD 9 again, and finally, smooth HD video started to play. Audio was set to SPDIF output, connected to my receiver for 5.1 audio. Looking at the CPU usage, less than 60% was utilized, with 15% of the GPU being used according to GPU-Z. This was quite acceptable to me. The next thing I did was to install PowerDVD 8 with the HD DVD patch. CPU usage fell to 40%, even in a dual screen setup where the video was being played back at 1920×1080 to my HDTV (connected via DVI -> HDMI). Picture quality was superb!
So a fairly useless 5 year old computer has now been turned into a perfectly capable Blu-ray (and HD DVD) player. So okay, the system is still a bit too noisy to become my primary Blu-ray or HD DVD player, but it’s good to know that I have options (especially on the HD DVD part). So this is what I’ve learnt while doing research on how to turn your old computer into a Blu-ray playing one:
- My P4 3.2 GHz can almost be considered overkill for Blu-ray playback with a Radeon HD card. The minimum you can get away with, with the occasional frame drop, may be an AMD AthlonXP 2400+ – anything faster should work fine.
- Your PSU will determine what kind of graphics card you can have. The ampage rating on your +12V is even more important than the total wattage. Look for 18A or better, otherwise you may need to get a new PSU
- Assuming you have an AGP slot (most likely, with an old computer like mine), get an ATI Radeon HD card, which will do most of the decoding on the card. For gamers, the best you can find is probably the HD 3850. For non gamers, anything carrying the Radeon HD brand will do, or you might even go with a silent option. Most likely, you’ll settle between either the Radeon HD 3450 for non gamers, or the HD 3850 if you want gaming. If you have a PCIe slot, then your options are much more open, although you’ll still want a Radeon HD.
- If you can’t see acceleration happening, then don’t forget to run the ATI HD Registry Tweaks.
- It would obviously be nice to have a 1080p capable monitor, but that’s unlikely to be the case with an older computer. However, consider in investing in a new monitor if you have an Xbox 360 that you can hook up to it.
- 1 GB or more of RAM is recommended. Windows XP is also recommended.
