Media/gaming pc help

[CraigS2]

Hi Gents

It's been a while since i bought/built a pc so i need some help. My current one is just not cutting it any more. some hesitation is visble during 1080p and 3d movies playback. I have:
-SSD vertex
-650w power supply
-5 year old dual core mb, 4 gig ram
-new geforce midrange graphics card (2 months old)

The idea is to scavenge what i can and upgrade mb, cpu, plus ram. My questions are, what should i be looking for and what can i expect to pay?

Thanks
Craig

 

[stixx]

Hi there, what would you like to use your PC for? To my mind, your current hardware listed above should be fine for playing 1080p movies, I'm not to sure about 3D ones.

Maybe you should try a OS re-install first before doing an upgrade, if the only purpose is to watch movies

 

[CraigS2]

It's a media pc mainly, with some gaming. Running Windows 7 (fresh reinstall when i got the ssd a few months ago). I assumed the ssd and graphics card would sort out the movie issue and it is better but there's still some lag especially with the 3d stuff.

 

[weelzSA]

I have a HP Microsever with 6gig ram and a GT 210 graphics card running Plex and have absolutely no problem playing Full BluRay or full 3D BluRay rips. What software are you suing to playback your media?

 

[ponder]

I think the OP has OS/software issues.

 

[CraigS2]

I'm using vlc for 1080p movie playback and powerdvd for the 3d iso's. Files are huge (+/-50 gig)

 

[CataclysmZA]

I think the OP has OS/software issues.

I'm using vlc for 1080p movie playback and powerdvd for the 3d iso's. Files are huge (+/-50 gig)

OP is using a dual-core and probably isn't seeing VLC offload the video decoding onto the GPU like it should be doing. Have you dabbled with VLC's settings, Craig?

 

[CraigS2]

No I havent really Wesley, aside from the sound setting to to optimise surround. Anything specific that i have to change or should I just play around?

 

[CataclysmZA]

Well there's two things you can change to see if it helps. By default these options are unticked because VLC needs to work on all devices and not every laptop or desktop can accelerate the video decoding process using the GPU. In any case

Open VLC > Tools > Preferences > Click on Video. Make sure the options for "Accelerated Video Output" and "Use hardware YUV-RGB" are ticked, as both offload a small part of the video decoding process into Direct3D. There's also a drop-list for "Output" - either leave this on the default setting or change it to "Direct3D Video Output". This is just to make sure that everything goes through the same channels. Go a little down to the drop-list for "Deinterlacing" and turn it on.

Then click on Input and Codecs. Check the box to use"GPU accelerated decoding" and turn the quality to 8. There's a lot of settings here that people use to get the best picture, but just turning on these two pretty much gets you started. I have a HD6870 1GB with a AMD Triple-core Athlon and my CPU usage hovers around 9% with anything I play back in HD. See if changing those settings makes a difference for you and report back. If it doesn't help, perhaps something else it at play.