HTPC Windows 10 Upgrade??

[TiniestCosine65]

Hey guys. This weekend I was messing around with my computer scraps and happened to get one running. But its old. And it really shows it. Heres the hardware: 

Motherboard- MSI RS480M

CPU- AMD Athlon 64 3300+

RAM- 2x 1GB 400MHz

GPU- ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series

HDD- 160GB 7200rpm Seagate

PSU- 300w

OS- Windows 7 Home 64bit

This computer was built for fun out of my scraps and just happened to work. And I know I cant expect much "power", if you would even call it that for this rig, out of it. But heres the problem. Since it worked I thought I would just stick it in my living room to replace the Wii, which only puts out 480p, for watching YouTube and Netflix. But it really really struggles playing 1080p Youtube videos, and if I turn it down to 720p it plays a little smoother, but still studders. I was wondering if upgrading to Windows 10 would help out enough to justify paying around 30 bucks for a key on Kinguin. I understand I am asking a lot out of a 15 year old system. But just thought it would be cool to get it going as an HTPC. If you have any other suggestions to improve the playback please let me know. 

[vorticalbox]

though windows ten is lighter I don't know if it will be enough to make videos play smoothly. You could try a light weight linux distro on a USB and see if that plays 1080p

[Quinten Verhelst]

Probably not 

I have tried it before you see.

Windows 10 does not give better peformance in a certain way.

[TheProfessionalAmateurs]

I haven't tried running windows 10 on a weaker system, but my friend has. He told me that his upgrade from windows 7 to 10 slowed down his computer a ton.

[TiniestCosine65]

I was under the impression that, like verticalbox said, it was much lighter. Just didn't know if it would be enough to help with the playback.

[TiniestCosine65]

Would upgrading the graphics card help? Not to anything crazy. I just don't know if it would help at all due to the cpu only being a single core at 2.4GHz.

[swordsman247]

10 minutes ago, TiniestCosine65 said:

Would upgrading the graphics card help? Not to anything crazy. I just don't know if it would help at all due to the cpu only being a single core at 2.4GHz.

You really need at least an okish dual core and 3gb of ram for most 1080p video streaming. A newer gfx card would help as well but I think that card might handle it okay? Not sure.

 

EDIT: the athlon 64x2's are really cheap now if you got one on eBay or somewhere. After looking not sure this board will support a dual core at all.

[TiniestCosine65]

1 minute ago, swordsman247 said:

You really need at least an okish dual core and 3gb of ram for most 1080p video streaming. A newer gfx card would help as well but I think that card might handle it okay? Not sure.

That's what I figured swordsman. The single core just isn't powerful enough. It was worth a shot.

[swordsman247]

Just now, TiniestCosine65 said:

That's what I figured swordsman. The single core just isn't powerful enough. It was worth a shot.

Yeah I've got almost the same thing lying around my workshop here, and only a few of the cpu's on this board would even run 10, they're just too old for most things.

[TiniestCosine65]

19 minutes ago, swordsman247 said:

You really need at least an okish dual core and 3gb of ram for most 1080p video streaming. A newer gfx card would help as well but I think that card might handle it okay? Not sure.

 

EDIT: the athlon 64x2's are really cheap now if you got one on eBay or somewhere. After looking not sure this board will support a dual core at all.

No, pretty sure the x2's started on am2. I have a couple am2 boards. But after trying all 4 of my Athlon x2's I'm thinking the boards are fried, or I may just have 4 bad x2's lol

[swordsman247]

1 minute ago, TiniestCosine65 said:

No, pretty sure the x2's started on am2. I have a couple am2 boards. But after trying all 4 of my Athlon x2's I'm thinking the boards are fried, or I may just have 4 bad x2's lol

Yeah the x2 are not on that socket, but I get them all muddled sometimes, same name and all.

[TiniestCosine65]

4 hours ago, swordsman247 said:

Yeah the x2 are not on that socket, but I get them all muddled sometimes, same name and all.

I just tried using my windows 10 installation flash drive I made a while back on this rig. I was planning on installing windows 10 on a spare hard drive just to see if it helped out the rig any. But for some reason its not working. I can choose to boot from it, the computer does recognize it. It just does bring up anything, just a black screen with a blinking underscore. Just to make sure my flash drive still worked I plugged it into my gaming rig and booted off of it just fine, and it brought the installation setup up right away. Any ideas as too why its not booting on this rig?

 

[Gordon Bennett]

Even if you get Windows 10 on it, finding the drivers for that GPU is really really difficult!

 

I have the same GPU on an old laptop. I wanted to use it in the kitchen to watch video whilst cooking. Getting it to work was a nightmare! W10 will not recognise your GPU on install, and will install a generic (and very bad) driver. If you connect to the net, W10 will download & install an AMD driver and correctly identify the HD3400 in device manager, but that Win 10 driver is next to useless for video playback, and you will need AMD Catalyst with a driver to get it to work correctly!

 

You will need catalyst drivers 8.1 I think, (from memory), and that isn't compatible with Win 10 at all. I managed it by installing Catalyst without the driver, then forcing the driver in legacy using add/remove hardware in device manager. The driver works & yes it will play 1080p smoothly.

 

The problem is that the screen goes blank for the first 20 mins after boot, whilst Windows sorts itself out. Only after that time is the system useable. So install Win 10 at your peril. So maybe stick with Win XP for video playback (and keep it off the net!). I'm putting that laptop back to Win 7 when I get the time, but XP is lighter & will use less of the GPU than Win 7 will on your system as your CPU is a tad slower.

 

As to your last post; there is a jumper which prevents writing to BIOS on your MoBo. Make sure its not enabled (so that changes will be written, not ignored when changing the boot method). Otherwise, you should be golden with booting from it, as the MoBo manual says that it will boot to USB 2.0 (is your USB FAT32?).

[swordsman247]

13 hours ago, TiniestCosine65 said:

I just tried using my windows 10 installation flash drive I made a while back on this rig. I was planning on installing windows 10 on a spare hard drive just to see if it helped out the rig any. But for some reason its not working. I can choose to boot from it, the computer does recognize it. It just does bring up anything, just a black screen with a blinking underscore. Just to make sure my flash drive still worked I plugged it into my gaming rig and booted off of it just fine, and it brought the installation setup up right away. Any ideas as too why its not booting on this rig?

 

Do you have a 64-bit only install drive? Some of the older boards have to have a 32-bit only installation drive to boot them from usb even the drives with both don't always work right. Otherwise double check the bios and make sure it bootable, and if it shows up in the hdd section that it's selected as first or on the top of the list.

[TiniestCosine65]

14 hours ago, Gordon Bennett said:

Even if you get Windows 10 on it, finding the drivers for that GPU is really really difficult!

 

I have the same GPU on an old laptop. I wanted to use it in the kitchen to watch video whilst cooking. Getting it to work was a nightmare! W10 will not recognise your GPU on install, and will install a generic (and very bad) driver. If you connect to the net, W10 will download & install an AMD driver and correctly identify the HD3400 in device manager, but that Win 10 driver is next to useless for video playback, and you will need AMD Catalyst with a driver to get it to work correctly!

 

You will need catalyst drivers 8.1 I think, (from memory), and that isn't compatible with Win 10 at all. I managed it by installing Catalyst without the driver, then forcing the driver in legacy using add/remove hardware in device manager. The driver works & yes it will play 1080p smoothly.

 

The problem is that the screen goes blank for the first 20 mins after boot, whilst Windows sorts itself out. Only after that time is the system useable. So install Win 10 at your peril. So maybe stick with Win XP for video playback (and keep it off the net!). I'm putting that laptop back to Win 7 when I get the time, but XP is lighter & will use less of the GPU than Win 7 will on your system as your CPU is a tad slower.

 

As to your last post; there is a jumper which prevents writing to BIOS on your MoBo. Make sure its not enabled (so that changes will be written, not ignored when changing the boot method). Otherwise, you should be golden with booting from it, as the MoBo manual says that it will boot to USB 2.0 (is your USB FAT32?).

You have the same GPU in a laptop? When I plugged in the video card it loaded some drivers automatically since I have it connected to the internet. This system is running Windows 7 at the moment by the way. Once it booted up using the card I went onto AMD's driver site and downloaded the HD3400 drivers that also come with Catalyst. I may not have understood you fully, but didn't have any trouble finding the driver. But I don't think the bad playback is due to the card. This system is only running a single core 2.4 GHz CPU. Anytime I even open Chrome it shoots up to 100% usage. It just doesn't have CPU power to even allow the GPU to work its magic. Bottlenecking.

As to the USB. I did not even think about a motherboard jumper. I went through the bios quite a bit but couldn't find anything that was related to booting off of a USB disabled. And I believe it is FAT32. I don't remember, but I could find out easily if you would like me to. I just followed the instructions for creating a Windows 10 USB installation device. I created it several months ago.

[TiniestCosine65]

7 hours ago, swordsman247 said:

Do you have a 64-bit only install drive? Some of the older boards have to have a 32-bit only installation drive to boot them from usb even the drives with both don't always work right. Otherwise double check the bios and make sure it bootable, and if it shows up in the hdd section that it's selected as first or on the top of the list.

I honestly have no idea about it being a 64-bit only install. I thought Windows just automatically went between 32 or 64 bit depending on the hardware. But I may not be understanding your question fully. And I read through the BIOS quite a bit. The computer recognizes it in the boot menu, and I can select it to boot off of. But when it tries to it just doesn't enter into the Windows setup. Gordon Bennett said my motherboard may have a jumper on the motherboard that is preventing the USB from writing to the Bios. That will be the next thing I will try.

[TiniestCosine65]

Also, I ordered an AM2 motherboard so that I can hopefully use one of my dual core CPUs and DDR2 memory to build a little bit better system. Still out of my extra parts. This was honestly an accident build that just happened to work, I was just crossing my fingers I could get some use out of it.

[swordsman247]

16 hours ago, TiniestCosine65 said:

I honestly have no idea about it being a 64-bit only install. I thought Windows just automatically went between 32 or 64 bit depending on the hardware. But I may not be understanding your question fully. And I read through the BIOS quite a bit. The computer recognizes it in the boot menu, and I can select it to boot off of. But when it tries to it just doesn't enter into the Windows setup. Gordon Bennett said my motherboard may have a jumper on the motherboard that is preventing the USB from writing to the Bios. That will be the next thing I will try.

Okay you can download a 32-bit or x86 windows 10 installer with the media creation tool and see if that will work if you have one with both it will default to the x64 instal which most modern things can use but it's an older system so... Yeah it doesn't detect x86 or x64 by itself it need to be chosen by the user.

 

16 hours ago, TiniestCosine65 said:

Also, I ordered an AM2 motherboard so that I can hopefully use one of my dual core CPUs and DDR2 memory to build a little bit better system. Still out of my extra parts. This was honestly an accident build that just happened to work, I was just crossing my fingers I could get some use out of it.

It's always fun to tinker with older things and see what you can get running again! Good luck on you're am2 build.

[TiniestCosine65]

11 hours ago, swordsman247 said:

Okay you can download a 32-bit or x86 windows 10 installer with the media creation tool and see if that will work if you have one with both it will default to the x64 instal which most modern things can use but it's an older system so... Yeah it doesn't detect x86 or x64 by itself it need to be chosen by the user.

 

It's always fun to tinker with older things and see what you can get running again! Good luck on you're am2 build.

I understand the installer question now. Thanks for the brain refresher. I just couldn't remember since I did it several months back. And thanks for the good luck! I'll post back on here my results once I get the board in. Should be in Tuesday of next week!