So I have a Dell with a 2.6ghz celeron and 1gb or 2gb of ram... Need to check on that. It unfortunately only has PCI slots. No agp or PCI-e. I have a blu ray drive in my other deskdrive that I'm not using because its in my office. So I wanted to build an HTPC for the living room with the Dell.

My question is, Does the PCI bus offer enough bandwidth to enable playback of Blu Ray if I get a Video card that supports HD video decoding?

These are two cards I'm looking at. One from tiger direct, the other from newegg.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4104561&CatId=1603 - 8400 gs 256mb


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131082 - 2400 pro

Thanks for anyhelp you can give me. I've been unable to find any info on whether this would work.
(I also plan on using one other PCI card... a wireless lan card)

11/14/2008 4:10:24 PM

the 2400 should work fine
http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd2400/index.html

Quote :

"Product Features * Hardware based H.264/VC-1 decoding of Blu-ray™ and HD DVDs"

[Edited on November 14, 2008 at 5:36 PM. Reason : .]

11/14/2008 5:35:13 PM

I think you greatly overestimate the amount of bandwidth required to play back HD content.

A conventional PCI slot has over a gigabit of bandwidth. An HD stream requires less than 50 megabits.

The reason all that bandwidth exists on PCIe and other busses is because things like games require a lot of information transfer between the graphics card and the CPU to generate each frame.

11/14/2008 5:49:45 PM

http://docs.cyberlink.com/multi/support/answerbox_productfaq.jsp?FID=2576&nProdId=31&ProdVerId=-1&nCateId=5

11/14/2008 6:58:15 PM

I appreciate it, I just wanted to check, I kinda got psyched out when I couldn't find anyone that had tried a PCI card for blu ray playback.

I appreciate the responses.

11/14/2008 11:08:52 PM