Is a P4 capable of HD or Blueray?

[outrun]

Okay my hardware setup is 2G Ram, 512MB Radeon HD2400 Video, and 3.2Ghz P4 HT 800Mhz FSB, XP SP3

it is 4 years old and i really like her regardless of "obsoleteness"
honestly i am very happy with the system being able to game, internet and have fun. I really do not see a compelling reason to join Vista or upgrade to a new dual/quad core computer .... yet. Online reading suggests that only a 3.6 P4 Extreme and multi-core processors can only handle Blue Ray correctly.

Will she handle Blueray if i buy the drive? Or will I have just wasted money on incompatible hardware? I am willing to spend on a top of the line video card (vs new motherboard/cpu) if that is the key. Is the CPU the main problem here?

 

[firemachine69]

She's good to go!

 

[greenaccord02]

For sure.

 

[astraelraen]

I would actually disagree and say that a 3.2ghz P4 is either not meeting, or barely meeting minimum specs to decode blu ray. You would probably be ok to play some disks, but having much, if any background tasks would cause dropped frames.

But a 2400pro has hardware decode abilities which take the processing load off the CPU.

On another note, does XP support HDCP? If not, and you don't have a HDCP compatible monitor your HD movies will get DRM'ified.

 

[PandaBear]

It is good to go, 2.4Ghz is the min requirement for HD or blueray. HD2400 has hardware decoding, with 3.2Ghz there is nothing to fear.

 

[Zembonez]

With your P4 and Vid card setup, you may run into choppy play running Blueray. The 2400 MAY have enough guts... but I'd recommend an upgrade to 4G of the fastest ram your MB will support. (which would be pretty cheap) I bet all would be good then.

NEWEGG, here you come!

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

How is upping from 2GB to 4GB of RAM going to help BluRay in this older system?

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
How is upping from 2GB to 4GB of RAM going to help BluRay in this older system?


It's not.

I have BOINC running at 50% on all four of my cores and I can playback 1280P BlueRay EASILY in Linux.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
How is upping from 2GB to 4GB of RAM going to help BluRay in this older system?


It won't even support it unless you run Vista or XP 64 bits (which is another problem of driver support).

Video decoding (H.264, used by both blue ray and HD video) is not memory but calculation intensive. It is the speed of the Video card's decoding engine that matters.

 

[mechjames]

I have an AMD athlon 2500+ rated at 1.8GHZ, and with my radeon x1300 i'm able to play 720P videos back smoothly on this old system. I think your P4 should work fine.

 

[Zembonez]

Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
How is upping from 2GB to 4GB of RAM going to help BluRay in this older system?


It's not.

I have BOINC running at 50% on all four of my cores and I can playback 1280P BlueRay EASILY in Linux.


In retrospect... you are both correct. Sorry for the wrong info.