Flash decoding support in AGP cards

[av-115]

Hi all,

I have an old Dell Dimension 4600 with a P4 3.4Ghz, 4GB RAM and Nvidia Geforce 7950GT AGP. Plays older games (pre-2010) pretty well and even handles Blu-ray disks with no problem. It's quite speedy for its age. However, Youtube videos stutter. 480p lags occasionally and 720p/1080p is out of the question. My internet connection is fine.

I know it's the P4 bottlenecking it and causing this problem as 1080p Youtube videos play flawlessly when downloaded. I understand Geforce 7 series cards don't support flash hardware acceleration. However, I've now got an opportunity to swap this card as the fan has failed and I'm going to return it.

Would a Radeon HD3850 give better Youtube/Flash playback? What about a HD4670? I've seen these cards go for around £30 - 40 on Ebay. Please don't tell me to buy a new system, I already have an i7 desktop and an i5 laptop. This PC is for light use in another room.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Andrew

 

[voltoid27]

You're in luck, Flash hardware acceleration was introduced with DirectX 10 level cards starting from the Geforce 8xxx (not an option on AGP) or Radeon HD 2000 series. The HD 3850 would be a lot better than your current card but it's video capabilities aren't as robust as the HD 4670's. I have an HD 4350 AGP myself paired with a 2.6 GHz Athlon 64 and it handles 1080p30 and 720p60 videos with aplomb, but doesn't do so well with 1080p60. (This is all with the H.264 codec forced on using the h264ify extension for Chrome). The HD 4670 is by far the best card for your needs, so buy away!

 

[av-115]

Hi, thanks for your reply!

Think I'm going to buy the 4670. Just to clarify, as long as it's AGP it should work, right? I've seen a slightly worrying thread here where his PC had no display and the "expert" replied saying cards with DDR3 memory won't work. To me that seems like total BS as it's nothing to do with the system RAM but just wanted to make sure that there's no reason why this card shouldn't work on my Dimension 4600.

Thanks again
Andrew

 

[voltoid27]

I've read that thread before, Dell computers always have these stupid limitations whenever you want to do anything remotely advanced; for example, I have a Dimension E310 and I tried to put a Pentium 4 651 in there, and the motherboard was like "nope, you can't do that." Dell didn't update their BIOS to support the new chip. Crap like this is why I hate Dell computers, so it's likely that the 4670 would indeed not work. If you do buy it and it doesn't work, you can always resell it to me since 4670's here in the US are in VERY short supply (they're going for $250, no way I'm paying that) 😛