Hi.
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!
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/suppor...oard.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
