Standard PCI video card for old computer for viewing HD video

[nightfly]

Just want a PCI card to occasionally watch full screen hd video. Computer is ancient by today's standards, P3 with 1 gig memory, all SCSI drives, Tyan dual proc motherboard with tual P3 tualatins. Currently has one of the 1990's ATI all in wonder cards with 128 meg memory which can display 1080 resolution, but cannot play video at more than a crawl, like 1 fps. Has to be PCI, not AGP or PCI express. Machine is used for basic use, not any gaming, other than CMOS battery, still works great (with occasional reinstall of winxp to keep everything 'fresh'). Will be viewing mkv files and considering adding an blue ray drive, have an nib adaptec usb2 card I can put in to connect it to. Running Win xp.

 

[Forceman]

I'm not sure it is possible with that system. I have an old Sempron AMD chip with an AGP video card, and I can't get it to play 1080p content smoothly either. I just don't think there is enough computational horsepower available there.

 

[nightfly]

I have a P4 northwood 1.8 gig machine with a AGP video card that plays HD things fine, so I was just wondering if a decent video card would do it for the P3 machine I've described above. I've found several PCI cards, but none of the reviews of them say anything about playing HD material. It's always only focused on playing games. And, I don't know if or how much video memory is required just for HD playback; they range from 128 megabytes to 512. My system ram is more than adequate.

 

[H-street]

any modern video card by nvidia or amd will have the hd functions built into the card..

there is an AMD 5450 PCI

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131436


and an

Nvidia 430
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500221

if you google search reviews on these two cards you should get an idea of their HD playback, both of these would be ideal for any HTPC
also besure to research on the mkv / container - encoding you are using.. not all encodings are accelerating by the video card.. if you stick to the most popular you should be ok though

if you need more reviews look at laptop reviews with similar mobile versions in them