HDTV stutters - Please help

[techhome]

New to Sage, but not HTPC. I've recently upgraded from MCE2k5 to Sage and from PVR500 (analog) to HDHR, tuning Comcast digital cable. Some HD channels have stuttering video as do HDTV recordings played back on my 720P TV that is driven from the Sage HTPC via a DVI to HDMI cable. I also have a Popcornhour NMT cabled to a HDTV via componentHD. The NMT plays the Sage HDTV recordings just fine, smooth and crisp. I assume the story will be similar on my sageHD theater, once it arrives. For now, I'd like to keep the HTPC as a combo storage server and frontend rather than relegate it to headless back-end server duties. It's dated, a P4 2.8 Northwood on a Springdale chipset, 2GB RAM and Radeon 9600 vid card.

BUT, I also have a MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard, 4GB RAM and single-core socket939 Athlon64 3000+ Venice, gathering dust. Oh, and a GeForce 6600 Video Card. Once I have a block of time, I plan to rebuild my HTPC on this consisting of Sage running atop XPMCE. Any guesses on whether this system will be able to smoothly play:

1. HDTV live & recordings
2. Streaming 1080P
3. Blu-ray

I'm not confident...

If not, please suggest an upgrade path. The mobo will take a PCI Express x16 vid card. For energy efficiency, I prefer to stick with a the EE / low power processor I already own and offload HD playback duties to an upgraded video card, but I'm not sure if the PCI Express x16 interface will be a limiting factor. Please offer your thoughts and suggest HDMI video card series, or an entirely different approach, that should help me achieve my goals.

Thanks!

Doug
aka TechHome

[paulbeers]

That Radeon 9600 is really not powerful enough for HD playback. Even that Geforce 6600 will be borderline (I had a geforce 6600 in one of my old client machines and it could do it fairly well, but was very borderline).

[paulbeers]

Oh and I should also point out that neither card has H.264 hardware decording therefore neither is suitable for Blu-Ray.

[techhome]

Paul, thanks for your responses. BTW, I sorted out the stutter issue on my current Pentium4 system, by overwriting the quartz.dll file in my windows/system32 folder with an older version from DirectX 9.0b. Info was in an old post on the Snapstream forum, here:
http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/beyo...vs-9-0c-2.html

Anyway, my ancient Pentium4 2.8C system with lowly Radeon 9600 is playing all HD files I can find with no stutter. I really see no need for Blu-Ray, so I'll likely just leave well enoiugh alone and enjoy my system.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by techhome

Paul, thanks for your responses. BTW, I sorted out the stutter issue on my current Pentium4 system, by overwriting the quartz.dll file in my windows/system32 folder with an older version from DirectX 9.0b. Info was in an old post on the Snapstream forum, here:
http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/beyo...vs-9-0c-2.html

Anyway, my ancient Pentium4 2.8C system with lowly Radeon 9600 is playing all HD files I can find with no stutter. I really see no need for Blu-Ray, so I'll likely just leave well enoiugh alone and enjoy my system.

Impressive! Glad to hear it's working! I wouldn't have guessed that the old 9600 could handle it. I retract my statement!