Processor upgrade advice

[soulprops77]

Hey folks,
I currently have an AMD Athlon 64 +3200, paired with an XFX GeForce 7950GT w/ 512mb or ram. This has been working pretty well for me for a while now. The only problem is that I get stuttering sometimes on some H.264 encoded content.

Would I get better performance by upgrading to an AMD Opteron 175 Denmark 2.2GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core Processor? I was also thinking of maybe going with an Intel setup, but I'd rather not buy a new motherboard.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Chris

[Apap]

I was considering the same thing, but the cheap bastard that I am is considering this Athlon 64 x2 4200+. The same clock speed but less L2 cache.

Does the increased cache size really improve performance in media encoding?

[autoboy]

Or you could get a ATI HD2X00 card and get 5% cpu on the same content. Are you using acceleration for h264? What codec are you using?

[soulprops77]

Do you reckon that the ATI 2400 and 2600 series is better than an Nvidia 8500 (do these have hardware acceleration for H.264 under XP yet?) or 8600?

Chris

[doc]

I don't know what the prices are like in the states but here in the UK the prices of Athlon x2's have plummeted in the last few weeks.

I see how cheap they are and think about upgrading all my pc's, but then the sensible head takes over and reminds me about the mortgage.

[autoboy]

The passive 2600pro IMO is the better card out there. There are some driver issues still pending but they are able to decode VC-1 and h264 on any processor you have. They also feature the best deinterlacing of mpeg2 HD content. The 8500GT does not support VC-1 offloading and does not offer vector adaptive deinterlacing on HD content. The 2600pro works fully under windows xp while nvidia still does not offer acceleration in XP.