Should my computer be this "slow" now? (Video files)

Syribo

Syribo

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 9, 2008
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Not sure which category to put this in, but it seems like a general question.

So, my computer (The first one in my signature) that I put together about 4 years ago has been kinda driving me nuts lately. Now, I know it's extremely outdated now technically.. But.. I assumed that it should still be able to do most things without too much of a problem. Not maxing out brand new really high quality games or anything, but things I use it for on a daily basis.

A problem I've been having for months now, and I don't remember this always being a problem, is with 1080p video. It skips and skips and skips. Or it is just completely screwed up, the video. It's choppy and impossible to watch. So I have to make sure I get 720p video if I actually want to watch it. It's not a driver problem or codecs or anything like that. It's ONLY with any kind of 1080p quality Blu-Ray quality video files. Or even streaming 1080p.

Now, again, I know my PC is outdated.. But.. shouldn't it be good enough to still be able to play 1080p files?? My friend bought a Dell this past fall. 4 gigs of RAM, no dedicated GPU, 4-core processor and the thing plays 1080p flawlessly, like I would think mine should still be able to do.

Does this sound normal considering the build? I am able to play games on it at high settings, some games very high, at 1920x1200 without troubles. But video files are the problem. I've tried it in a lot of different players. DivX, Media Player, Media Player Classic, VLC. I have the usual codec packs installed. And this happens with movies, tv shows, anime.. everything. And any kind of file type.

The weird thing is that I can still run a ton of things at once on here without any slowdown. at any given time I have four or more streams on Ustream open (I do close them when I try to play the video files, and it makes no difference) and a ton of other programs running. The only problem I encounter on this machine is with any amazing quality video files.

Edit: Oh, and for fun.. I don't have anywhere near enough money to build a new system right now. But if I did have some money to afford some upgrade(s) on this, would it even be worth it? Would faster RAM, a better GPU (Instead of the 8800GTS SLI), anything even make a difference? I'm honestly very happy with it still. It's just this ONE thing that bothers me!
 
I can play 1080p Mkv files with my htpc in my sig. Your pc is stronger, so something is up.
 
Zepher said:
I can play 1080p Mkv files with my htpc in my sig. Your pc is stronger, so something is up.
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This is what I thought. Again, just like my friends Dell that IS newer, but technically mine should perform better.. I don't get it. I don't get how it runs streaming video, 720p, and games fine.. but not 1080p. It has been driving me nuts though, because to me it just doesn't make any sense at all to me.
 
Run a stress test on your GPU and see if it passes (Furmark, Metro 2033 bench, Heaven, etc). Scan your computer for viruses making sure its completely clean.
 
DarkTower said:
Run a stress test on your GPU and see if it passes (Furmark, Metro 2033 bench, Heaven, etc). Scan your computer for viruses making sure its completely clean.
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Oh good idea about the stress test.. I ahven't done that in a while. I usually use Furmark. I will try that. I scan daily with SuperAntispyware, and multiple times a week with NOD32. I also will run TDDSKiller sometimes as well. Nothing has come up for a long long time.
 
David_CAN said:
How hot is the processor, is it throttling?
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Well actually.. That's another problem. I made a post on the Cooling board last week about it. But first I want to say that this problem was happening in fall and winter, when my temps are really low.

My PC is out in the dining room because of the noise and light of it, drives me crazy at night and even during the day in my room. But we only have air conditioners in the bedrooms. So during the summer, and especially this heat wave we've all had, it was ridiculously hot in the dining room. Well above 90F. So my temperatures on both the CPU and GPU were ridiculous last week. I think the cores were at about 69, 68, 73, 71 and that's barely being used at all, just web-browsing stuff. The GPU's were both at about 75C, also not running anything. In the winter, fall and spring they are WAY lower. My average temperatures are let's say between 30-38C for the CPU cores, and 45-50C for the GPU's.

I do feel that the temperatures of the GPUs and CPU are a bit higher than they were last summer. I have been wondering if I should use my old MX-1 thermal paste, reapply it and reheat the HSF. I haven't done that in probably more than two years, at least. I also need to get more compressed air and clean out the dust. I have a lot of fans in it. Three in the front, one on top, two in back, and the 250mm side fan. And the ZEROTherm Nirvana HSF.

But again, even though I am worried about these temperatures (I haven't run a single video game in more than two weeks because I know that if I try, the GPU's will shoot up to over 90C [With the fans on 100% always]), this same problem happened during very cool weather as well.

I do want to run Prime95 and see what the temperatures will get to, but afraid of getting the heat that high. Right now it's not AS hot as it's been, but with just Spotify, Firefox and Pidgin going, the CPU is at 61, 61, 69, 66. the GPU's at 67 and 73.

Edit: Oh and duh, I forgot to mention. My PC is at stock speeds in the summer. So the GPU's and the CPU are not overclocked at all right now.

Edit 2: I started Furmark and got freaked out when my temps got up to 90C and stopped it. I'm sure I'm overreacting, but it scares me to have it get higher than that. Based on how it was rising, I can say that I think it would have gotten to about 95C at least.
 
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Well cleaning it and keeping it cool certainly can't hurt and would further eliminate cooling as a possible issue.

Have you tried doing a fresh OS install?
 
Danny Bui said:
Well cleaning it and keeping it cool certainly can't hurt and would further eliminate cooling as a possible issue.

Have you tried doing a fresh OS install?
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I did it just a few months ago. Sadly I had this problem before that, and after that. I might do it again anyway.
 
My guess is that its partially a cooling problem and partially a software problem, if you have a spare hard drive or anything i would suggest installing a fresh trial copy of windows 7 and not installing anything besides drivers and vlc, then you can try playing some 1080p content on it, if it works then its a software issue, if not then its got to be hardware.

only other thing i can think of is installing coreavc and windows media player classic home cinema and telling it to use the coreavc codecs. I used coreavc on a 1.6ghz atom netbook and it played back 720p and some 1080p content (still had issues with high bitrate stuff but most of it worked)


i'm betting that your pc is throttling but its probably also got some crapware on it too, even a throttled quad core should be able to play 1080p content without issue
 
lilfiend said:
My guess is that its partially a cooling problem and partially a software problem, if you have a spare hard drive or anything i would suggest installing a fresh trial copy of windows 7 and not installing anything besides drivers and vlc, then you can try playing some 1080p content on it, if it works then its a software issue, if not then its got to be hardware.

only other thing i can think of is installing coreavc and windows media player classic home cinema and telling it to use the coreavc codecs. I used coreavc on a 1.6ghz atom netbook and it played back 720p and some 1080p content (still had issues with high bitrate stuff but most of it worked)


i'm betting that your pc is throttling but its probably also got some crapware on it too, even a throttled quad core should be able to play 1080p content without issue
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Hm.. I don't have a spare drive, but I could just clear some stuff off one of the three in this computer and use that. I don't have that much crap on it, I don't put stuff on it I know I don't need or won't use. And this problem occurred months ago before I reformatted and re-installed Vista, and after as well. It's just so frustrating that everything else is fine, video that is not 1080p is fine, streaming is fine, games are fine in 1920x1200 resolution. It's crazy.

I will try coreavc. I use WMP Classic now, my preferred video player. I also think I am going to reformat again, and try once again to play any 1080p video file right away to see what happens.
 
You could also try just one video card. Even one 8800GTS should be able to handle 1080i just fine. Maybe something is screwy with your sli configuration? My GTS 250 plays 1080i just fine and its not much better then just 1 or your 8800GTS,s, and you have a better cpu than I do.
 
I'd check out your CPU usage during playback.

If it seems high (near 100%), I'd say you've got a video driver issue causing problems with hardware playback on your video card.

I know on my HTPC (AMD E-350) if hardware acceleration isn't working properly, it's basically useless for HD video. With hardware acceleration, no problem with 1080p video.
 
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