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Do Pentium III Tualatin systems have enough power to watch .mp4 1080p content with the right video card?

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computerdude92

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This would be an awesome PC to have. Low TDP of only 32W to become a SILENT media playback PC. Is it possible when you combine the CPU with an HD capable video card such as a PCI 32-bit interface GeForce 210? Anyone have experience with this? I think the GeForce 210 needs at least a Pentium 4 CPU, and these fastest PIII's match up to a 2GHz P4 in speed. Would my idea work?
 
Short answer: no. Unless you would find a graphics card that does all of the decoding, a single-core P3 is way too slow to do 1080p.
 
I managed to get 1080p good playback with a P3 800 Coopermine, in a HTPC also. But with a Radeon AGP (Can't remember it now, will look later if you need) that could do the decoding part. The problem was with internet 1080p playback, the system didn't have the necessary speed to be able to handle that amount of data. When I built it in 2008 it was very ok, could even play BluRay. But in 2012 and onwards, the internet amount of data required was much higher, the system could not work with enough speed. Worked ok for offline usage.
 
I had a dual 1.4ghz tualtin with 2gb of PC133 RAM, after it graduated as my workstation I used it as an HTPC for years. BUT I was never running it at 720 or 1080. During this machine's tenure I still had it driving an old tube TV and a couple 4:3 monitors. I did however routinely play 1080p videos in this configuration, just not at full resolution.

Sadly I broke the AGP slot on the motherboard some years back. I ended up dismantling the PC, but couldn't bare to part with it. Otherwise I'd pull it out and see how it works.
 
This is very much the wrong forum for my answer... but you might be a lot better off with a Raspberry Pi or similar. These things can handle 4K video decoding and scaling in hardware, use much less power and output to HDMI natively.

That being said, I am sometimes running an old Core Duo notebook (1.5 GHz or so, 2 GB RAM) with integrated Intel graphics and Linux. VLC handles MP4 at 1080p fine, although it struggles with high bitrate files. Network streaming also puts a surprisingly heavy load on the CPU, causing decoding performance to drop. Any in-browser entertainment (Youtube) is barely acceptable at 720p and cannot keep up at 1080p due to the network. Also, forget about any modern encoding (H.265, VP9 or similar).

Another data point: I've used a VIA C7 (1 GHz) subnotebook, and it could handle 720p really well with hardware decoding (I don't think the hardware supported 1080p decoding at all.) However, the video would display in front of everything else, including the player controls. It wasn't the best experience, but it worked.

To summarize: You probably won't be happy with your idea.
 
Svenska said:
This is very much the wrong forum for my answer... but you might be a lot better off with a Raspberry Pi or similar. These things can handle 4K video decoding and scaling in hardware, use much less power and output to HDMI natively.
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Have you had much luck playing videos from a NAS on a pi?
 
I have not tried, as I only have first-generation Pi's which are way to slow. :) Before the pandemic, I used the Core Duo laptop for this purpose successfully, but I changed my apartment to cater for partial home-office work since then - and my NAS was a casualty. It hasn't been active much in recent years.

Playing videos on a PineBook (Allwinner-based ARM64 laptop, similar to a Pi at its core) worked fine in principle, but was very fiddly to get working well. I assume it works better in Android than standard Linux, but I didn't care enough to fix everything.

If you don't want to waste much time with these weird systems, you might have more luck with an old laptop. The Core Duo laptop I mentioned had a broken display which I removed, so it's a nice case with keyboard/touchpad connected to a TV. Got a remote USB keyboard/mouse thingy and apart from it getting too old, it's better than any Pentium III could ever be.
 
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Depending on the video card PIII *might* do okay with videos encoded in MPEG2 or the original MPEG-4 H.263/DivX codecs, but anything ”modern” will kill it. H.264 was murder for that generation of hardware unless you retrofitted them with newer video cards and even that was hit or miss… and that was like 15 years ago.
 
Exactly. Old graphics cards didn't support modern codecs (and if they did, they definitely didn't at the high resolutions and bitrates commonly used now), new cards will get you into driver hell with older operating systems, and new operating systems will get you into trouble with the old hardware.

I've seen cool setups in the day based around Hauppauge WinTV cards, but they were centered around SDTV resolutions and MPEG2. Completely useless nowadays.
 
I had my 1.4GB Tualatin up and running a while back on top of XP. Actually it was a pretty nice period gamer but I can't say what resolution or video card I was using at the time.
 
computerdude92 said:
and these fastest PIII's match up to a 2GHz P4 in speed. Would my idea work?
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While the PIII did have a P4 beat in efficiency and core performance, it couldn't hold a candle to a P4 in memory or bus bandwidth, which is where you'll run into the performance bottleneck.

You might be able to squeeze out 720p in very specific scenarios, if you had a late AGP card like an HD4650/70 that could do most of the heavy lifting on the codec. You'll also need other accelerated devices to offload tasks from the CPU, like a gigabit NIC that has its own DSP, and preferably a sound card with the same. Software driven network and sound eats up a considerable amount of CPU time.

hunterjwizzard said:
Sadly I broke the AGP slot on the motherboard some years back. I ended up dismantling the PC, but couldn't bare to part with it. Otherwise I'd pull it out and see how it works.
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Not sure how you break an AGP slot so badly that it doesn't work anymore, but they're not terribly difficult to remove and replace with a hot air station and desoldering gun.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Not sure how you break an AGP slot so badly that it doesn't work anymore, but they're not terribly difficult to remove and replace with a hot air station and desoldering gun.
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I chipped a piece of the back and the card wouldn't seat correctly after.

If they are easy to repair, are there possibly professionals I could send it to? The board has quite a lot of sentimental value and I would very much love to put it back into service.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I chipped a piece of the back and the card wouldn't seat correctly after.

If they are easy to repair, are there possibly professionals I could send it to? The board has quite a lot of sentimental value and I would very much love to put it back into service.
Click to expand...

You can try asking in the hardware section here, or over on tinkerdifferent. I'd offer to do it myself, but I'm so busy that I don't have the time. I've already had someone else's project sitting on the backburner way too long and need to get their stuff back to them.
 
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