Intel Atom D510 and discrete graphics card: does it make sense?

Question

Iron

I'm facing the problem of building a small HTPC at minimal cost. The farm already has a Pegatron IPXPV nettop with a built-in Intel Atom D510 (2x1.66GHz) with an Intel GMA 3150. Of the video outputs, only D-Sub. All this does a great job of playing movies in 720p, but at 1080p it already starts to shut up.
Does it make sense to buy an inexpensive separate video card (like this one )? Requirements - only the possibility of normal playback of 1080p and the presence of HDMI.
And one more thing: the motherboard has only PCI-E 1x, and all available video cards have PCI-E 16x. I have such a riser , but will it have enough performance? I repeat: no games, only movies.

Answer 1

If you have Linux and XBMC there, for example, with vdpau support, then you could generally take the simplest atom and start video on any card with vdpau support. For example, my old 8600GT spins all 1080p with a processor load of 1-5%.
By the way, you can buy an old video card on Avito, for example, like mine.
For example www.avito.ru/moskva/tovary_dlya_kompyutera/asus_geforce_8600_gt_pci-e_256mb_1400mhz_128bit_107087686
True, I don’t know how it will get along with your PCI-E 1x.
Another option is to buy an accelerator. liliputing.com/2010/04/broadcom-crystal-hd-video-decoder-available-for-49.html
This thing plugs into the PCI and is designed to watch video, but it does not add HDMI.
Alternatively, for that kind of money you can even buy a mini-pc on arm or x86 with hardware support for 1080p. And there will be less energy to eat and everything is assembled specifically for these purposes + silently and without coolers.

Answer 2

habrahabr.ru/post/57676/ - here is a little about how to speed up video playback.