T40p - YouTube HD Clips - Need to upgrade to 755/765?

[macmac]

Hey everyone,

I still adore my faithful T40p (1.6Ghz Banias/1GB/160GB 5400RPM), but the only thing that annoys me about it is the fact that I can't watch YouTube HD movies smoothly. Processor usage hits the 97% mark and then frames get missed and the audio gets out of sync.

So I was thinking of upgrading to a Pentium M 755 or 765. Not only would I get a nice 25/31% clock increase, but also a slight benefit from the increased L2 cache. However, do any of you have any experiences with these processors? Will either play YouTube HD content smoothly? How about x264 720P movies?

Any and all thoughts are welcome

[poshgeordie]

Have a look at this topic which give details on Banias processors and the faster Dothan equivalents.

Yes you can fit the 755 and 765 processors but they are V expensive.

Apparently the cheaper 1.7 735 chip works extremely well and it's been reported that in use it's only slighly behind the faster ones.

I don't know how well they work with HD YouTube vids.

[macmac]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm well versed on the various processor models, and the fact that the upgrade is do-able, and the cost of the upgrade would be minimal (sub-$100). I just want to know if it would achieve my objective

[Neil]

I don't have the hardware nor the network bandwidth to offer any first hand experience. But here are the requirements from the Hulu website. I imagine the requirements for YouTube would be similar if not the same.

System Requirements for viewing HD videos at Hulu
Flash Player 9.0.115.0 or higher
2.5Mbps Internet connection or greater
Windows: Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor (or equivalent), 128MB of RAM, 64MB of VRAM
Macintosh: Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz or faster processor, 256MB of RAM, 64MB of VRAM
Linux: Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor (or equivalent), 128MB of RAM, 64MB of VRAM

[macmac]

Hmm, interesting, thanks.

Although Hulu's HD content is of significantly higher quality than YouTube's.

I guess my original question should have been whether anyone with a Banias chip can run YouTube HD content smoothly

[dr_st]

The 1.8GHZ Dothan Pentium M 745 seems to be the sweet spot in many ways.

I have it in my T42, and measured its performance roughly on par with the Pentium 4 3GHZ that I have in my older desktop. The P4 runs 720p HD videos without any stutter, but chokes on 1080p.

[sjthinkpader]

My wife's R52 with 750 runs YouTube fine, but CPU temperature goes to 80 deg+. So I think the browser uses CPU instead of GPU. It would be interesting to try Chrome and see what it does.

[dr_st]

These old GPUs cannot do anything to assist HD decoding. This functionality was added starting from ATI HD2xxx / nVidia 8xxx series, if I am not mistaken.

[macmac]

Thanks for all the comments.

I'm going to take the plunge.

PM 755 + 2GB for about ~$150CDN, can't complain really.

[Hauskaz]

YouTube HD will play pretty well on my 1.7 GHz Dothan T42 in Firefox, but stutter horribly in Chrome. It's pretty disappointing, since Chrome is my main browser.

The 755 should work just fine.

[Terrahawk]

I've been testing with a Banias 1.6 GHz and a Dothan 1.8 GHz (from my X31 and T42p respectively). The 1.6 GHz Banias will play Youtube HD, but exactly how well depends on how much movement is in the scene playing right that second. I watched the Disney Earth trailer and there is a part where there is a wide-angle view of a large number of birds. The Banias could not handle it and it became a slideshow, at about 1.5 seconds per frame. The rest of the clip played at approximately half frame rate (15 fps?) with 100% CPU usage.

The 1.8 GHz Dothan proved to play it much better, with the wide-angle bird scene pegging the CPU at 100% and dropping several frames during playback. The rest of the clip played smoothly with the CPU at about 75-80% usage. However, this is *after* the video clip had been cached locally. Watching the clip while simultaneously downloading it caused it to stutter randomly (i.e. mostly 30fps but hiccuping every now and then with CPU usage hitting 100%), and in my opinion, the experience was worse than with the Banias' mostly smooth half frame-rate experience (CPU is always stuck at 100%, even while downloading).

If I were to watch these things properly, I would consider a 2.1 GHz Dothan to be the bare minimum to be able to process everything smoothly, including wide-angle scenes with truckloads of birds.

OS: Windows XP SP3
Web browser: IE8
Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicARYcTe6w&feature=fvst
Settings: Full screen, HD on.