P3 733 possible? (1 Viewer)

[Hasse]

Hi!

Yes, I did a quick search, but still ask this question - is it even remotly possible to run MediaPortal on an Intel P3, 733 Mhz, 512 Ram and a "decent" GF2 graphics card?
No interest whatsoever (yet) in digital television - I use other stuff to watch tv, but the TVGuide will be nice. Oh, the OS will be Windows 2000.

Thanks for any input!

/hans

 

[Koschel]

I don't think, that MediaPortal will be working with that hardware, especially with the GF2. Maybe listing music, watching pictures, weather and some of the other stuff could work.

 

[sonofparker]

The processor should be fast enough, but there could be problems with the graphics card as it does not support directx 9. If you can put something like a geforce fx5200 in it then that should be fine - that card also has an MPEG decoder which can take a lot of load off the CPU. I am using a mini-itx board with a 1GHz C3 processor and it didn't work at all well with the built in graphics but the fx5200 works really well and makes decoding digital TV a possibility.

 

[Hasse]

Hi!

Well, I´ll give it a try. A GF5200 is cheap, appr. 45-50 €. Also quiet, all models I found was 128 MB without fan - a plus, indeed!

/hans

 

[bartmanson]

Hi Hasse,

I'm using Mediaportal 1.3.0 (CVS August 12) on an PIII 900 (768MB) with a Geforce2 connected to a PAL tv and it works perfectly for MP3, DVDs, Videos, Recording/Timeshifting with a PVR350, Pictures, ...

I don't think that the difference between 733 and 900 will make a big difference if you have a hardware mpeg2-encoding tv card.

But, nevertheless I'm thinking about buying an FX5200 or an Radeon 9550 because of two reasons:
- the Geforce2 needs TV Tool in order to provide overscan on its tv out. If you do not use TV Tool there will be black borders around the windows desktop.
- If you watch sports (formula 1 or football) live or recorded there is some tearing and i hope that this will improve if the graphics card supports hardware mpeg2 decoding and is able to reduce cpu load.

HTH,
BartManson

 

[Hasse]

...one GF5200 later...

Well, here I am again. The GF was a bargain, and on top of that fan-less, so now my rig is really quiet. Nice! However, it didn´t solve my only problem so far, streaming video from svt.se. But, that was however solved by changing the buffer-settings in WMP10.

The nice thing that I noticed is the full compatibility with the Nvidia drivers. The GF2-card didn´t fully comply with those drivers, and I can see the problem that would arise when I was supposed to connect the rig to the TV. No need to worry about that. MP (0.2.0 RC) works alright even on these specs, P3 733 with 312 Ram. Soo silent...

/hasse