Can a K6-III 400 handle a good DivX movie on an MVP4?

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mamba
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Can a K6-III 400 handle a good DivX movie on an MVP4?

Post by mamba »

Hi guys,
I got an old system with an MVP4 mobo on it.
K6-II 333@400Mhz
The VGA is the integrated Trident Blade 3D (8megs shared, no AGP slot).
128megs

Actually it's my sister's system and it can handle WinXP pro and Office2003 with no probs.
Now she wants to see DVDs and DivX movies and asked to me to change his PC.
Now I think that the onboard Trident is good for DVD.
I'm absolutely sure that a good DivX movie would be difficult to watch.

I found a K6-III 400Mhz at a cheap price, can this only upgrade be enough to watch DivX?

Thanx
Guest

Post by Guest »

I doubt it. The cache doesn't help that much with mpeg, it really needs mhz more than cache.

The K6 will choke on DIVX, as it can barely handle MPEG-2 without some hardware acceleration. And the Trident/MVP4 does not accelerate DIVX, I do not believe.
Guest

Post by Guest »

However, the latest Xcard from Sigma Designs accelerates DIVX in hardware. However, the price is a little high at around $80 though. For that price you could get a much faster used CPU and motherboard. But sometimes it's fun to squeeze an old system for all it's worth, so maybe the Xcard is an option.
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mamba
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Post by mamba »

Maybe changing the VGA with a Radeon PCI?

I know about several K6'er here who can watch DivX...
Was hoping that a K6-III (non plus) could be enough...

Oui? Non?
Guest

Post by Guest »

Mmm. That's odd. MPEG4 should be more difficult for a K6. I'm not aware that Radeons or GeForces accelerate MPEG4, only MPEG2. To boot, they don't even accelerate 100% of the stream, maybe like 50 or 60%.

Maybe I'm getting too old?
Guest

Post by Guest »

Well, I just checked "DIVX" on the search function, and generally, it looks like most people who've tried say it barely works, even with a Radeon. Even then, there are no guarantees.

"From my experience, using ATI 7000 AGP cards, a 500Mhz K62 (non +) on a 1 Meg cache Fic VA_503+ mobo will work ok, with no visible jerkiness in the motion. A 550 K62 on a 512K Asus P5A-B board will also work but it will be really borderline, so that you have to use every possible bios tweak to generate a bit more speed, to get the no visible jerkiness effect."

Oddly, I tried this very combination, and was never able to get an ASUS Radeon A7000 to work on it.

"The K6-2+ has a Radeon 7500, though I think I recall that even with the Rage 128 Pro, it played nearly perfectly smoothly."

"This really doesn't apply strictly to dvd movie watching, but on my k63+ I found one of the things that suffers the most nowdays was playing encoded movies, mainly divx ones. In my past experience it takes at least 400mhz or better to play either dvds or encoded movies smoothly, 600 mhz or more has no issue at all if not much is running in the background, but skipping from place to place within the movie at least on my system was taking a absurd amount of time on higher resolution divx files. If it helps anyone, I was able to gain a great deal of speed by switching to the newest ffdshow codec, and using zoomplayer to view the movies. One issue I may have is my dismal video card, I do not know how much running a radeon etc would help matters."

"I have the next system : Jetway SIS 530 Mainboard+ K6-2 @ 500+ 64 Mb PC100 RAM. I'm using 4 Mb from the main memory for the Integrated SIS Video card a SIS 6236 chip ... I think. Problem : DivX Movies. 1)Some work perfectly ... they have around 100Kb/s. 2)Some don't ... even if they have even 98Kb/s. 3)I use Win98SE + DX8.1b. 4)I've tried and experiment using Win98 FirsEdition (Faster from my experience) + only DX and drivers = perfectly working DivX movie even @ 158kb/s /. How can that be possible?!?!?! Still ... I've never been able to get those results again..."

"My experience has been that 500-550 MHz are borderline for smooth DVD video playback. When using a 500 it was only possible on a mobo w/ 1Meg cache. With a 550 512k would work provided that I used every possible tweak in the bios to pick up a bit of extra speed. (500 on a 1 meg board works better than 550 on 512k)."

"If you have PCI, pretty much anything should work with 16+ megs onboard, such as a GeForce 2 or greater. The general rule should be 16 megabytes or greater videocard is probably fast enough to run divx movies. That may not be the only problem though, as Jim is pointing out with the processor, maybe even more ram."

You are looking for some long nights trying to sqeeze MPEG4 through an old K6. I say go the decoder card route myself. The picture quality is also VERY noticably BETTER than software render, and you can still do other stuff if you have to when the movie is running.
shaddam
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Post by shaddam »

yes it's possible... you need an well configured system...

found for me that ffdshow is the fastest decoder
http://m17n.cool.ne.jp/freeware/mpc/

as player perhaps bsplayer or zoomplayer (fast)

and foudn also out that the via agp driver 4.35-4.37 (in turbomode) is needed to allow fast enough overlay support

good luck

Anonymous wrote:Well, I just checked "DIVX" on the search function, and generally, it looks like most people who've tried say it barely works, even with a Radeon. Even then, there are no guarantees.

"From my experience, using ATI 7000 AGP cards, a 500Mhz K62 (non +) on a 1 Meg cache Fic VA_503+ mobo will work ok, with no visible jerkiness in the motion. A 550 K62 on a 512K Asus P5A-B board will also work but it will be really borderline, so that you have to use every possible bios tweak to generate a bit more speed, to get the no visible jerkiness effect."

Oddly, I tried this very combination, and was never able to get an ASUS Radeon A7000 to work on it.

"The K6-2+ has a Radeon 7500, though I think I recall that even with the Rage 128 Pro, it played nearly perfectly smoothly."

"This really doesn't apply strictly to dvd movie watching, but on my k63+ I found one of the things that suffers the most nowdays was playing encoded movies, mainly divx ones. In my past experience it takes at least 400mhz or better to play either dvds or encoded movies smoothly, 600 mhz or more has no issue at all if not much is running in the background, but skipping from place to place within the movie at least on my system was taking a absurd amount of time on higher resolution divx files. If it helps anyone, I was able to gain a great deal of speed by switching to the newest ffdshow codec, and using zoomplayer to view the movies. One issue I may have is my dismal video card, I do not know how much running a radeon etc would help matters."

"I have the next system : Jetway SIS 530 Mainboard+ K6-2 @ 500+ 64 Mb PC100 RAM. I'm using 4 Mb from the main memory for the Integrated SIS Video card a SIS 6236 chip ... I think. Problem : DivX Movies. 1)Some work perfectly ... they have around 100Kb/s. 2)Some don't ... even if they have even 98Kb/s. 3)I use Win98SE + DX8.1b. 4)I've tried and experiment using Win98 FirsEdition (Faster from my experience) + only DX and drivers = perfectly working DivX movie even @ 158kb/s /. How can that be possible?!?!?! Still ... I've never been able to get those results again..."

"My experience has been that 500-550 MHz are borderline for smooth DVD video playback. When using a 500 it was only possible on a mobo w/ 1Meg cache. With a 550 512k would work provided that I used every possible tweak in the bios to pick up a bit of extra speed. (500 on a 1 meg board works better than 550 on 512k)."

"If you have PCI, pretty much anything should work with 16+ megs onboard, such as a GeForce 2 or greater. The general rule should be 16 megabytes or greater videocard is probably fast enough to run divx movies. That may not be the only problem though, as Jim is pointing out with the processor, maybe even more ram."

You are looking for some long nights trying to sqeeze MPEG4 through an old K6. I say go the decoder card route myself. The picture quality is also VERY noticably BETTER than software render, and you can still do other stuff if you have to when the movie is running.
Jim
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Post by Jim »

The comments re 500 - 550 Mhz processors, and amount of cache required to get smooth DVD referred to K6-2s; non + w/ only 32k on die cache.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
Guest

Post by Guest »

Jim, I tried it with a K6-II+ at 600Mhz, using 384MB SDRAM, Via MVP3 at 100Mhz, ATI Radeon 7000, and Power DVD 5 and WinDVD 4, and it still was not smooth. Close, but noticably not smooth for enjoyment.
Jim
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Post by Jim »

K, First let me say, I don't like Power DVD 5; I have found Power DVD 4 to be better for me. Aside from that, however, you should be able to get smooth playback w/ that combo. "Q": What kind of ram are you running, PC100, or PC133? - And what have you got your timing settings set at? Next "Q": Do you have your board set at "Write Back", (big mistake for MVP3 boards), or "Write Thru", (Works best). Next "Q": Do you have your "Pipeline" settings enabled? How much cache has your mobo got? Is it enabled? Have you enabled "Write Allocate"?

MY K6-2+, (@6x100), is currantly on an FIC VA_503+ running NT4 w/ a Radeon 7000, and that can handle DVD. Before that it was on an ASUS P5A-B w/ 512k cache w/ an ATI 7500 Radeon aiw, and that too could handle DVD. If you have it, Norton's "Sys Info" applet has a benchmark that I used to tune my machines so I could get smooth DVD. I found that I needed a result of 120 or better w/ 512k; while about 104 would do for 1meg cache.

If you still want to get that working, post your bios settings; and we will see what we can do. Note : "PowerTweak 2" does a pretty good job of tuning your machine for performance, provided you are not also using WPCredit. (Conflicts).
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
smoke
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Post by smoke »

Anonymous wrote:Jim, I tried it with a K6-II+ at 600Mhz, using 384MB SDRAM, Via MVP3 at 100Mhz, ATI Radeon 7000, and Power DVD 5 and WinDVD 4, and it still was not smooth. Close, but noticably not smooth for enjoyment.
Did you have DMA enabled on the DVD drive? If it wasnt, this could solve the problem.

Using winXP? From what I have seen, XP runs very poorly on chips that are short on CPU on die cache. Older willamette and northwood core p4 based celerons have 128KB effective on die full speed cache, like the k6-II+. Ive seen for myself and heard from a few others that these chips just wont run XP satisfactory, even with ample amounts of RAM. But, they will run 2k more or less as expected. It looks to me like XP is just too big to run effectively with 128KB cache.
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KGB
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Post by KGB »

smoke wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Jim, I tried it with a K6-II+ at 600Mhz, using 384MB SDRAM, Via MVP3 at 100Mhz, ATI Radeon 7000, and Power DVD 5 and WinDVD 4, and it still was not smooth. Close, but noticably not smooth for enjoyment.
Did you have DMA enabled on the DVD drive? If it wasnt, this could solve the problem.

Using winXP? From what I have seen, XP runs very poorly on chips that are short on CPU on die cache. Older willamette and northwood core p4 based celerons have 128KB effective on die full speed cache, like the k6-II+. Ive seen for myself and heard from a few others that these chips just wont run XP satisfactory, even with ample amounts of RAM. But, they will run 2k more or less as expected. It looks to me like XP is just too big to run effectively with 128KB cache.
You're Correct about the L2 cache requirement for WinXP, even in performance mode it is not enough, and I've never upgraded my Win98 to it.

My K6-2 is lacking both on-die L2 and on-board L2 (I disable it for stability reasons) Even with Win98, large Divx files with framerates >20, it is typically 2 seconds behind the sound output. Ive tried everything, and the MHz crunching power is not enough, granted K6-2 has a weak fpu. But, re-iterating what others have said, you need more "PowA".
-K6-2 550 Gigagyte GA-5AX (5.2) 1x512MB GeForce 2 Ti500 64MB
-Pentium III 933 Asus P3C-L 2x128MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB DDR
-Pentium III 750 Asus P3B-F ATi Rage128 GL 32MB
-Celeron 1.2 Asus TUSI-M 2x128MB
-Pentium IV 1.5 DELL 2350 1x128MB
-Athlon 900 Asus K7M 1x256MB 2x128MB GeForce 3 64MB
-AthlonXP-M 2400+ Asus K7V880 2x512MB HIS Radeon HD3850 512MB DDR
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mamba
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Post by mamba »

I have just tried a DivX on my VAIO (K6-2+ 533MHz with an infamous Cyberblade) and it runs ok, no sound delays, even if not PERFECTLY smooth, but I think that this is a VGA matter. Cyberblade is a really slow chip on 2D also... And I have WinXP on it....

I don't understand...
shaddam
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Posts: 17
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 3:27 am

Post by shaddam »

the key for running an DIVX/XVID movie dropless on a k6 machine is... to use an FAST and OPTIMIZED decoder....like the assembler optimized ffdshow
use the daily builds after mid-november... there was an problem in the 3dnow code before...

http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiwiki ... ng+ffdshow
mamba wrote:I have just tried a DivX on my VAIO (K6-2+ 533MHz with an infamous Cyberblade) and it runs ok, no sound delays, even if not PERFECTLY smooth, but I think that this is a VGA matter. Cyberblade is a really slow chip on 2D also... And I have WinXP on it....

I don't understand...
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