AGP Graphics card for older PC to improve YouTube?

[Rob]

Hi,

I use an older PC (single core 2.8GHz Pentium running Windows XP). It does everything great, and USED to play YouTube videos wonderfully.  But about a year ago, as Adobe started to upgrade Flash past version 10, and YouTube made some changes, suddenly, more CPU % was required to play the same 480p videos.  Sometimes, I'm forced to use 360p mode on YouTube.

The PC has an old, not great Intel Graphics chip in it, but it has an AGP slot.

I'm wondering if there is an older AGP graphics card I can pick up for cheap that would allow Flash to use the hardware acceleration feature - and therefore the GPU on the card to do video decoding instead of the motherboard GPU.

There are a lot of cheap old AGP graphics cards on eBay - some for $10 or $20 - but I suspect I would need one that decodes .h264? Not sure which old model would fit the bill, if any.

Is my thinking correct?  Anyone know of an old model with such capability.

I do NO gaming, so this would only be for YouTube and perhaps Sony Vegas work (if Sony Vegas can even use it).

Thanks

Ideally you want a card that supports UVD so HD2000 (apart from 2900) series upwards.  AGP HD2400 can be bought fairly cheap but I understand that you need to apply certain tweaks to the registry for certain files.  HD3450 might make more sense if you can find one decently priced.

[Rob]

This is a Windows XP computer, so I'm not even sure I can run anything past DirectX 9 on it.

DirectX 10 and 11 cards operate fine under DirectX 9 on XP.  I've been using a 4670 with XP for years now.

It's better to get something newer than 9800 or X800 etc since they don't have the UVD hardware acceleration and will largely rely on the CPU so you'd probably be left in the same position with those cards.

I'd definitely recommend getting something like a 3450 or maybe 4650 depending on price.  Generally you do pay a premium for AGP versions look hard enough and you should be able to et something reasonably priced.