[thorton82]

Hi, new to this community, have a few questions I would really appreciate answering if possible.

I have an old PC that was collecting dust, and decided to turn it into an XBMC pc. Installed the software, works great for the most part, but anything other than the most basic SD content is pretty choppy. The config is as follows.

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (939 single core)

2GB DDR400 ram

Nvidia 6600 (i think its a GT or something, a factory over clocked version, anyway)

Windows XP SP3


So.. Pretty old and slow. I would like to get this playing 1080p content, with the minimum capital outlay possible. I was thinking about upgrading the graphics card to an Nvidia 210 or 520 but then I was told I would need to upgrade to windows 7 to take advantage of hardware acceleration. So two questions:

1. Will hardware acceleration cure my stuttering issues?

2. If I buy a new graphics car, can I install Ubuntu and will that allow hardware acceleration?

Also toyed with picking up a 939 spec X2 processor from ebay, but they are all in the $100+ region in Australia, which is new motherboard CPU territory.


Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

[artrafael]

Try running XBMCbuntu or OpenELEC instead of XBMC on top of Windows and see if you notice any improvement.

[Xdan]

I would go with XBMCbuntu over OpenELEC, had some skin issues with OpenELEC.

[poofyhairguy]

1. Will hardware acceleration cure my stuttering issues?

Yes. Either card you mentioned will.

2. If I buy a new graphics car, can I install Ubuntu and will that allow hardware acceleration?

Yep. Just use XBMCbuntu. I have a HTPC with the same CPU and a GT210 and it plays 1080p all day.

[aptalca]

Agree with poofy

I had the same cpu in my secondary htpc that just died. I coupled it with a gt520 under win 7 and it played everything. The only problem I had was slowness of win 7 due to 1GB of ram. (XBMC worked fine, but other windows tasks sometimes came to a crawl especially when antivirus was running and opening firefox or chrome took forever) But I also put openelec on it and worked perfectly fine. The only reason I stuck with win 7 is because I used it as a print server and a scanner machine.

See how it died here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...oubleshoot

PS. You really do not need a new cpu. just get an nvidia 210 or 520 gpu, put openelec on it and you'll be set.

[knight2000]

What about HDMI Audio passthru will it work correctly? like full 7.1 if needed?

[poofyhairguy]

HDMI audio works great on all new Nvidia cards. Heck even the lowly GT210 can send uncompressed 7.1 audio over HDMI. Get a GT 520 if you want to bitstream HD codecs with the new audio engine.

[knight2000]

I ask cuz im on the same boat here, have an old xp3200+ system being a big paper weight and would like to give it some use. Only thing is if i wanted to get a newer board for that cpu, like mAtx what would u guys recommend? used of course i doubt they still make those anyways.

Currently it has an atx asus a7n8x-deluxe

[mrdally204]

I'd love a bit of help getting an old system running. I just gave XBMCBuntu a run and while in XBMC, the CPU ran at 100% the whole time. Menu navigation was killing me. Exit out to the Ubuntu install and it was very snappy. The PC I am trying to install it on is here. Can someone please give me any advise (besides get a new rig ) Graphic card is the integrated one that came in the system, memory upgraded to 1gb. Thanks for the responses

[mrdally204]

I fixed the issue I was having with my installation. Turns out XBMCbuntu does not have some drivers for old video cards (nVidia GeForce 2MX) I had to remove the current Nvidia drives and install a compatible legacy driver. Once I did this, the GPU took over and xbmc ran rather well considering the PC is pushing 10 years old