Celeron 550 enough to play HD video (1080p) ?
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Posted by on May 16, 2008, 7:45 am
Please log in for more thread options Will be a Celeron 550 @ 2 Ghz enough to play HD video (1080p) ? I am considering to buy a new laptop, and Celerons 550 are inside of many of them. I googled for information regarding this processor and there is no much info... Thanks! | |||||||||||||
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Posted by Paul on May 16, 2008, 10:12 am
Please log in for more thread options The results from this article might help a bit. They show two kinds of GPUs (graphics chips). One kind has acceleration features for HD playback, providing some acceleration. They also show some high end gaming cards, where the GPU designers decided to not include the video accelerator. http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3047&p=5 H.264 suffers the worst, in that the weakest processor they test with, runs at 98% utilization, when there is no GPU acceleration feature. And the processor used is a P4 560 (3.6GHz 90nm processor from a while back). In the Core2 world, a 2.4GHz would be close to that in performance. Your Celeron 550 runs at 2GHz, and has only a single core, so would be weaker than the old P4. (Granted, depending on the playback software used, it might be possible that some multimedia instructions work slightly better on Core2.) So, what that means is, when shopping for your laptop with the Celeron 550 processor, it has to have a "real" GPU in it. It cannot be some crappy Intel Northbridge with integrated GPU. It would have to be a more expensive laptop with a separate GPU, one for which you could look up on the Nvidia or ATI web sites and see if the GPU includes VP2 or UVD or whatever. http://ati.amd.com/products/MobilityRadeonhd3600/index.html (has UVC) See 8400M GS or GT here, as an example from Nvidia of full featured acceleration. That might be the VP2 block, but they don't summarize it that way. So if you had the Celeron 550 (Core2 single core with small cache at 2GHz), and something between 8400M to 8700M, that might be enough. With video decode acceleration, it helps if that logic block has a high logic clock, so there will be some variation between those chips, as to how effective they might be. (As always, the best estimate is an actual benchmark.) http://www.nvidia.com/attach/926540?type=support&primitive=0 I hope I'm giving you the general impression, that if you don't get the GPU details *just* right, the weak CPU is not going to save you. (You'll still have SD capability.) And based on more than one benchmarking article, it takes a lot of driver iterations, for the software component to work well. A lot of people buy video cards, and have to wait a year or a year and a half, for features like accelerated playback to be finished. If you had a "CPU centric" hardware solution (crappy GPU, powerful CPU), then at least you're only at the mercy of the latest version of PowerDVD. If you're relying on the GPU to do half the job, you might have to wait until the driver side is mature. I suppose another way to do this shopping exercise, is to buy a notebook, that states *specifically* that it is fast enough to handle H.264 or VC-1. Or shop for your laptop at a big box store that can demonstrate movie playback for you. You could always bring a DVD with you, that has content suitable for some worst case benchmarking (like a known high bitrate). Dell XPS M1530 has a separate GPU. Around $1000 to start. http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4135 This guy tried to play 1080p, but had trouble. His GPU is Geforce Go 7800GTX. That is a previous generation separate GPU. http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=Tech_Talk_XPS_Laptop&message.id=13201 In addition to the computing side of things, there is also the display itself. If you're going to send the image digitally with DVI or HDMI to an external display, then for super high resolutions you'd want HDCP (encrypted content protection). HDCP is part of HDMI, but for DVI it is optional (so you have to check for it). You may want to read up on the subject, if you have some grand plan to watch movies on something other than the laptop screen. Vista may have some different rules for this kind of user activity. You have to be a freaking rocket scientist, to watch a movie :-) You could also try a private forum like this one, for more info. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=888726 Paul | |||||||||||||
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Posted by kony on May 16, 2008, 11:37 am
Please log in for more thread options On Fri, 16 May 2008 04:45:53 -0700 (PDT),
spectrumero@gmail.com wrote: >Hi.
> >Will be a Celeron 550 @ 2 Ghz enough to play HD video (1080p) ? > Alone, no. With all your ducks in a row and offloading to the drive video card, driver and playback software, maybe, or maybe eventually. >I am considering to buy a new laptop, and Celerons 550 are inside of
>many of them. The typical laptop with one won't have discrete video so that wouldn't be capable unless the compression codec didn't require a lot of processing (relatively). >
>I googled for information regarding this processor and there is no >much info... > >Thanks! Paul gave a good reply. I'll just add that it may complicate things less and cost little to no more for equivalent performance at playback, plus faster at all other tasks as well (save for 3D gaming) to get one with a faster dual core CPU and integrated video instead of the addt'l cost of discrete GPU, though it doesn't resolve the HDCP issue. | |||||||||||||
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>
> Will be a Celeron 550 @ 2 Ghz enough to play HD video (1080p) ?
>
> I am considering to buy a new laptop, and Celerons 550 are inside of
> many of them.
>
> I googled for information regarding this processor and there is no
> much info...
>
> Thanks!