RADEON HD 3650 + Athlon t-bird, HD capable?

[hertswenip]

I'm about to acquire a Radeon HD 3650 AGP video card.

I plan on installing it in an old athlon t-bird 900mhz, to make some use of it as a HTPC.

Because the 3650 has a UVD, will an athlon 900 be adequate to play blu-ray/1080p? I ask, cos ATI claims the UVD offloads all the video processing from the CPU, is this correct?

 

[jaguarskx]

UVD can help with decoding HD video, but decoding Blu-Ray still needs the CPU to handle some processing. The HD 3650 had an early version of the UVD so offloading / decoding blu-ray not as well optimized as more recent Radeons. Your CPU is much too slow to decode Blu-ray which generally requires a dual core CPU.

I recall seeing a benchmark of a Pentium 4 3.0GHz and a Radeon HD 3xxx or 4xxx graphics card struggling to play a blu-ray movie. The CPU load on the CPU was at least 80%.