The above picture is a Joke, When I mean old, I don’t mean that old.

So to answer the question: Yes and No

Here is my experience

Dell Dimension 8300: Pentium4 3.0 GHZ / 1 GB RAM / Windows XP Pro

Now that spec does not meet the minimum CPU requirements. Not that it stopped me from trying.

The machine was an aging Dell Dimension 8300. The 8300 had an AGP video bus.

Luckily ATI do an AGP based video card the 2600HD (this comes in both PCI-e and AGP). I needed the older AGP version Circa £50.

Tip: For HD playback your video card needs a minimum of 256mb of video. If the card can also do on-board video decoding all the better.

So I figure if I am slightly under the spec on CPU the video card can take some of the slack as it has onboard video processing via the ATI AVIVO technology.

Note: You need to consider how to manage any HDCP issues you may encounter unless your are going HDMI all the way.

I hook up an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive (to the PC over USB)

Upgrade my PowerDVD 7.0 Ultra (it can play back HD-DVD and Blu Ray)

I pass the audio out over SPDIF on my sound card to an amp.

I connect the PC to a 32″ 720p display over VGA.

So I then sit down curious if all of this is going to work and to my surprise it did.

720p video playback was fantastic, smooth no problems.

So why the yes and no?

Well Hi-Def content can do things like picture in picture video and this seems to be double trouble for a slow PC. The video goes out of sync. More or less it is dealing with 2x HD video streams.

I was pretty sure it was CPU performance related so quickly tested this setup on a Dual Core 1.86Ghz and the sync issue goes away instantly.

Advice

Would I recommend an old PC as a candidate? on reflection No. Start with a Dual Core and Decent video card.

Recommended Buy: The ATI 2600 Series. I have tried 3 of these cards in various PC’s and they do a really great job on Video playback.

The dual monitor support also seems pretty solid. However this isn’t a gamers card. But this is reflected in the price.

If you have any questions please use the comments.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Blog Entries, Hi-Definition, Recommended Buys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.