[Bremen]

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Athlon 3500+. Originally put a GeForce 7100GS in it, but when I read that 8500 & 8600 had hardware H264 decoder built in, I thought I'd try.

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Ouch, I thought you were using an old old Athlon, not one of the 64bit chips :-\ If your choice is a faster chip or WinMCE I'd point out a top line S939 chip is cheaper than WinMCE :0) Although its impossible to know if you'd still have problems until you try it [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] (if the player/library is multithreaded you shouldn't have a problem, dunno if thats the case)

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Yeah I considered a different codec, but H264 is REALLY nice and divx/xvid just don't do as good of a job as H264.

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I don't blame you in the slightest.