Hi,

With that processor you are not going to get the best playback, especially with BR's.

If you are looking to upgrade I would suggest (depending on your budget) going for a motherboard, processor bundle (you can get an i5, motherboard and ram for around £300).

If you can stretch for an Nvidia card that gives you DXVA, you can get a decent GTX660 for around £180.

Yes, you are correct, you cannot upgrade to an Intel processor with your current setup.

Hope this helps,

Jay

I tried it with a Phenom II X4 940 at 3.4ghz, with all effects turned on, and the effects barely use the processor, like 10% of each of the four cores.

This said, on a Full HD TV, those effects do more damage to the picture than good. I can see their use when watching a Blu-Ray on a screen with a higher than 1920x1080 resolution, but on a Full HD screen, I would recommend keeping them turned off.

One effect may be useful among all... while my Toshiba TV's "AMR 100" technology does a MUCH better job than "TrueTheater Motion", for those who have basic screens, this can make motion in heavy actions scenes smoother indeed.

But the other effects... don't turn them on for a Blu-Ray.
And if you have a really poor quality Blu-Ray with a lot of noise, if you really have to, rather use the noise filtering from your graphic card control panel than the TrueTheater ones... My collection: http://www.blu-ray.com/community/collection.php?u=194008&action=showcategory&category=1&categoryid=7

Quote: Hi,

With that processor you are not going to get the best playback, especially with BR's.

If you are looking to upgrade I would suggest (depending on your budget) going for a motherboard, processor bundle (you can get an i5, motherboard and ram for around £300).

If you can stretch for an Nvidia card that gives you DXVA, you can get a decent GTX660 for around £180.

Yes, you are correct, you cannot upgrade to an Intel processor with your current setup.

Hope this helps,

Jay

Quote: I tried it with a Phenom II X4 940 at 3.4ghz, with all effects turned on, and the effects barely use the processor, like 10% of each of the four cores.

This said, on a Full HD TV, those effects do more damage to the picture than good. I can see their use when watching a Blu-Ray on a screen with a higher than 1920x1080 resolution, but on a Full HD screen, I would recommend keeping them turned off.

One effect may be useful among all... while my Toshiba TV's "AMR 100" technology does a MUCH better job than "TrueTheater Motion", for those who have basic screens, this can make motion in heavy actions scenes smoother indeed.

But the other effects... don't turn them on for a Blu-Ray.
And if you have a really poor quality Blu-Ray with a lot of noise, if you really have to, rather use the noise filtering from your graphic card control panel than the TrueTheater ones...

I just found out the model number of the motherboard. It's an Asus M3N78-EM .
Going by the this list it supports almost every AMD processor including the Phenom II X6 as it has an AM2 / AM2+ slot.

http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/list.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=m3n78-em&p=1

I'm looking for advice on which CPU to get though and I don't really know which processor speed to choose either. I currently have DDR2 8GB RAM and an Nvidia GTX-460.
I'm not going to use the computer for gaming, only for playing blu-rays and applying TrueTheater enhancements.



I'm running an Optoma HD67 720p 3D projector on a 150inch screen and I plan to use TrueTheater HD at around 25%. When the image is blown up to that size, I find that TrueTheater brings back some of the lost detail. But if I increase the percentage any more,
it induces artefacts like you said. As of now, I can use True Theater for HD video files like trailers from apple.com but when I insert a blu-ray, TrueTheater automatically gets disabled and Hardware Acceleration gets automatically turned on. Also, when playing a blu-ray, all of these options get greyed out which means I can't enable disable any of them.
I'm hoping getting a new processor will fix all these issues.

Do you think an X6 is necessary or will an X4 do the job? What about processor speed?



Thanks a lot for your help so far.

Quote: I'm running an Optoma HD67 720p 3D projector on a 150inch screen and I plan to use TrueTheater HD at around 25%.

The resolution of a Blu-Ray disc (1080p) is already much higher than your projector's resolution. There's absolutely no need to use any upscaling technology like TrueTheater HD. All you will do is damage the quality even more, you can't restore pixels which cannot be displayed by your projector.

Also, from what I've read, TrueTheater HD doesn't work when 3D is enabled (correct me if I'm wrong, Michael), which may be the source of your problems.

Quote: Do you think an X6 is necessary or will an X4 do the job? What about processor speed?

Well, my good old X4 handles all effects turned on for a Blu-Ray played on a 1920x1080 TV without breaking a sweat, so from my personal experience, a X4 is enough for those resolutions. My collection: http://www.blu-ray.com/community/collection.php?u=194008&action=showcategory&category=1&categoryid=7

There are many X6 Processors here starting at 80$. I don't know which to choose :

http://shop.amd.com/us/All/Search?NamedQuery=phenomii&SearchFacets=categoryrocessor&promoid=piip01

Not sure your motherboard supports AM3 CPUs, you may want to find an AM2+ one. My collection: http://www.blu-ray.com/community/collection.php?u=194008&action=showcategory&category=1&categoryid=7

Quote: Not sure your motherboard supports AM3 CPUs, you may want to find an AM2+ one.

According to this, it supports Phenom AM3 CPUs. Also, AM3 chips have lesser number of pins.

What is the difference between an 80$ X6 and a 225$ X6? : http://shop.amd.com/us/All/Search?NamedQuery=phenomii&SearchFacets=categoryrocessor&promoid=piip01

I think the difference between am2 and am3 cpu's is the ability to work with ddr3. now if you have a board compatible, try and find a cpu with low tdp, which may fit your mobo. and yes, i was watching 1080p hd stuff on c2d, which is slower than phenom II so you can stay relazed while you make this purchase.

though i will recommend waiting and getting a new graphic card which will have some new features like hdmi 2.0 and h265 hardware decoding, as that will take away the load from your cpu to gpu.

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1455231/hdmi-2-0

amd delayed its graphics card.. so i think you can expect one or both of the above coming in their new gpu line to be launched later this year.

cheers!