Hardware required for upscaling SD to 1080p? (1 Viewer)

[Raveen]

I've been using MP for a while now with an old pc attached to my SD TV and very good it is too. Yesterday my new 42" 1080p tv arrived (and is magnificent ) and I've moved from the SVideo dark ages to the shining HDMI future.

My old box is a Dell Optiplex GX 270 with a P4 cpu and various spare parts added by myself (Xfi sound card, wi fi network card, Radeon 9550 AGP card and two PCI Black gold DVB-T cards). This was fine for a SD box and works well enough on the new TV but I'd like to try upscaling my TV and DVDs as well as playing Blu Rays as well.

So this means a new machine. What I'd like to know is what would you folks suggest in terms of hardware. Cheap would be good as would reusing as much as possible from my existing setup.

 

[etheesdad]

I just upgraded from a p4 2.4 ghz 1gb ram 9200se gpu because the machine wasnt able to play blu ray / 1080p

I opted for an x2 5200, 2gb, HD4550 (passive), and its excellent.

Seems the popular cpu atm is 4850e, and this is definitely a worthwhile contender for htpc - cheap, powerful, low energy consumption and easy to cool (heat tolerance over 70 degrees)

On the GPU front, A number of people are going down the 780g (integrated graphics) route, but there are some very mixed responses as to how good it is with MP and 1080i
see this thread:
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...2/user-experience-amd-780g-mediaportal-43361/
- a good way to save money but not without its quirks

I think perhaps you're looking at minimum cpu/mobo and ram, and (optionally) adding a discrete video card. This means you retain case, psu, wifi card, sound card, hard drive<s> from existing build

more information on GPU's here
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...ardware-selection-4014/index3.html#post343888

There's a lot of good build information in the HTPC Projects thread.

 

[Raveen]

Thanks for the advice, very helpful reading material

What's the most important factor in upscaling SD to 1080p, GPU or CPU power?

 

[sfhtemp3]

Definitely CPU power

Any reasonable modern GPU will do the job (H.264 decoding required)

but if you start to play with DVD to 1080p upscaling (ffdshow+avisynth filtering) you run out of CPU very very fast.

I am personally using an intel core2duo E6600 CPU (which is enough for a decent upscaling job) but a quad core CPU would not hurt