Win Will upgrading video card make a difference?
#1
My father has a PC in his office he gave me as he doesn't need it any more. I'm trying to see if it will work to run XBMC on it nicely. So I read these requirements: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBM...quirements and it looks like this PC is meeting the minimums (just barely I think). It has Windows XP on it.

Its a Dell Vostro 200 with E2180 2.00Ghz processor, 3GB RAM, and Nvidia GeForce 8300 GS video card. I hooked it up via Gigabit LAN, and tried a movie that's located on our home server. The results were a bit choppy. I verified network performance is fine. CPU is running at about 75%. I'm not sure how much the video card is running.

If I upgrade the video card, will it improve performance?
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#2
IMHO your way fine. Did you try the xbmcbuntu livecd yet?
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#3
Hey, no I haven't. Will that improve performance? I really just want to have smooth 1080p streaming. If a video card upgrade solves that, then I'm happy. The other bonus is upgrading will allow me to buy one with proper HDMI with audio. The 8300 GS had only DVI and from what I read, can't pass audio over it.

But before I buy one, I just want to make sure that upgrading will actually make things smooth, or if the issue is with the CPU or somewhere else.
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#4
there are cheap cards out there for $30 or $40 that outperform that 8300 card.
the GUI is run on CPU so a videocard won't help there
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#5
Only the 8800GT, 8600GT/S , and 8500GT have support for hardware decoding of h.264 and VC-1 streams (from the 8xxx series cards), so the decoding in your case is purely done by the CPU, which is too old and weak for high bitrate 1080p materials

ANd XBMC does not support hardware acceleration under Windows XP, only 7 and Vista.
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