Thread: Ati Radeon Hd 2600

THESE DAYS, nearly any PC is capable of playing high¬definition movies, thanks to improved software and driv¬ers, and new HD-assisting graphics cards.

ATI's Radeon HD 2600 and nVidia's GeForce 8400GS expertly offload high-defini¬tion chores. Meanwhile, ATI's entry-level Radeon HD 2400 offloads HD processing, too, but it renders movies at only no lines of vertical reso¬lution (1080 lines is the stan¬dard for high-defmovies).

Minimum Needs for HD To gauge how slow is too slow for a CPU to play HD movies smoothly, I set up two fairly tame test beds: a PCI Express system with a GA-K8N51PVM9-RH nForce 6150 motherboard from Gigabyte, 1GB of DDR 400 memory, and a single-core Athlon FX-53 CPU; and an AGP system with an Abit KV8-MAX
Via K8T800 based motherboard, an Athlon 643200+ CPU, and
512MB ofDDR 266 memory. I used an Xbox external drive to play HD DVDs on each system, and I used a Pioneer BDC-2202 to play Blu-ray titles. In all cases I used a Dell 2407 monitor with a maximum resolution of 1920 by 1200-the resolu¬tion required to view high¬defmovies in full 1080.

I gradually underclocked the FX-53 from its native 2.4 GHz to 1 GHz, watching for playback deterioration. The 3200+ was locked at 2 GHz, so I had to extrapolate re¬sults based on CPU usage.
I tested four graphics cards on the PCle system: MSI's ATI-based Radeon HD 2400 Pro and RX2600XT, and XFX's nVidia-based GeForce 8400GS and 8600GTS. VisionTek's Rade¬on 2600XT, at $180 (approx Rs. 7,000), was the priciest board I tested, but it also was the only fully offloading AGP card I found. I ran it with the KV8-MAX.

I used CyberLink's Power¬DVD 7.3 software to play Casino Royale on Blu-ray and Luclry Number Slevin on HD DVD; both are encoded with AVC, the most CPU-intensive codec. I tested under Vista, with the Aero environment and Windows Search dis¬abled. I eyeballed the movies for smooth playback and I monitored CPU usage.

After I updated PowerD¬VD to build 3502 to fix a bug, all of the PCle cards efficiently offioaded HD movie playback. Even MSI's budget HD 2400 Pro played Casino Royale acceptably at 1 GHz, albeit at its nop limit, with about 95 percent CPU usage. Its higher-end sibling, the RX2600XT, hit similar CPU usage at 1 GHz but rendered at full1080p. With either ATI-based card, I had to set the CPU to at least 1.2 GHz to smooth out the playback of Luclry Number Slevin.

Neither the XFX 8400GS nor the 8600GTS managed acceptable playback at 1 GHz; but at 1.2 GHz and higher, they played both discs-and ran every other HD DVD and Blu-ray title I threw at them-flawlessly.

The VisionTek 2600XT AGP card (which I couldn't underclock) was equally facile with the test bed run¬ning at 2 GHz, using only 65 percent of the CPU cycles. I likely could have dropped the CPU speed to at least 1.4 GHz before hit¬ting a glitch.

My test sampling is too small to base concrete system requirements on, but they do show that you don't need a state-of-the-art PC to play HD. Any PCle or AGP system with a 1.4-GHz or faster CPU-single- or dual¬core, AMD or Intel-and a fairly fast hard drive should suffice for HD movies, if you use one of the graphics cards I tested. Even if your similarly configured PC can't quite scale the HD hill, up¬grading to a CPU that can handle the load will not cost you much.