Old computer - can it play full HD if upgrade graphic card?

[Prototype v1.0]

Hi.

I have this old stationary computer. It's not running right now, so the spec's might not be accurate.

It is equipet wih an AMD (2200, single core) and a 32MB AGP graphic carrd, and is (no suprise) not capable to play any full-HD video files.

Question is: If I upgrade the graphic card to the most powerful (not compared to new HW of course) AGP graphic card avaiable on that computer, will it be capable to play full HD video files?
Or will the old slow CPU set the limit?

Question #2 - I prefer to use VLC for playing video files. Is it differences between programs for showing video so that some programs demands less CPU than others?


Thanks

[DB83]

I think not. I believe there is a data speed restriction on the AGP bus irrespective of the cpu's speed

[newpball]

Question is: If I upgrade the graphic card to the most powerful (not compared to new HW of course) AGP graphic card avaiable on that computer, will it be capable to play full HD video files?
Or will the old slow CPU set the limit?

I think it is a total waste to spend any good money on this totally outdated computer.

[usually_quiet]

1. There are still some AGP cards available, at least in the USA. Some are even HD capable and HDCP compliant with MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 hardware acceleration, plus an HDMI port. Here is one example http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-498.shtml that is suitable for HTPC use.

However, in my opinion, it is not worth spending any money to upgrade a system that is 8-9 years old with a new AGP video card. For one thing, you might need a better power supply too. Also, capacitors on the motherboard or other components in a system that old may be on the verge of failure. Driver compatibility could be another problem.

2. If a software player can take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration, and the video card supports it for that kind of video, it will allow some of the work required for decoding video to be done by the GPU instead of the CPU.

[redwudz]

VLC uses a fair amount of resources. I would try XBMC or MPC-HC, but I think the video card will still be your problem. Both players do fairly well with slower PCs.

[jman98]

I had an old PC from the same time as the original poster. It had a better single core AMD CPU than he has and I looked into trying to get it to play HD video by upgrading the video card. My experience is that I wasn't able to find a video card that could use the GPU to help with the video processing in that old hardware. This is going to be the most difficult part of trying to do this as I don't know if any AGP video cards really and truly can do GPU hardware acceleration. Some of them claim to be able to do it, but if you look into it you may find that such claims are greatly exaggerated and if they can do it, you'll need something you don't have like a dual core CPU or something else missing from your system.

[Prototype v1.0]

Thank you for sharing your experience

Then I going to use the old computer for other tasks, maybe file backup server.