Minimum processor to play hd video

[kthkollar]

Hello, I am trying to play hd video on a geforce 6200. 256 mb Nividia card. It is very choppy with a pentium 4 processor. Would a pentium d processor handle this ok?

 

[CaedenV]

HD is more a GPU requirement than a CPU requirement. Any CPU that fits into a mobo with a PCI Express slot should do fine enough. Then get a GPU that is HDCP compliant for Blue-ray and other HD content playback. I would suggest at least an 8000 series card (my wife's C2Duo paired with a 8600GT works great, and there is 0 CPU load on video playback as the GPU does all the heavy lifting). I see no reason why a Pentium 4 (so long as it is an LGA socket) would not be able to hack it unless you had other issues (like less than 2GB of Ram). If it is an old P4 on a PGA socket then you may be out of luck as the buss speeds alone would be too slow to put that much data through.

Whatever card you get, make sure that your power supply is big enough to use it properly.

 

[CaedenV]

Forgot to mention; if your platform is too old and you do need to upgrade, the onboard GPU on the Sandy Bridge processors has more than enough kick to play back HD content. Even a basic Pentium G series CPU with HD2000 graphics would do fine. So if you do look into rebuilding then know that you do not need a GPU unless you plan on doing some high end gaming.

 

[kthkollar]

Thank you!

 

[saratj1]

I had a nvidia 6300le and it had trouble with hd playback, and that was with an amd dual core cpu.
I also had an nvidia gt210 fanless gpu that would overheat with hd playback but would do fine with standard resolutions