Recommendation for upgrade on YouTube 1080p video watching

PandaBear

PandaBear

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Asking for dad.

He has a Phenom II X2 560 BE CPU, 12GB of DDR3 1333 MHz (4GB+8GB), 512GB SATA SSD, ATI FirePro 2270 with 512MB, ethernet to fiber optics internet (just because he can). Most of his day he just watch YouTube or other streaming videos all over the Internet.

Recently he started complaining that NBA streaming on YouTube at 720p (max) is not smooth. I am visiting him right now and see it on the screen, it is watchable but not smooth. My mom's ideapad 300 (i3 6100U, 12GB DDR3L, on wifi) seems a bit smoother.

So, I looked at the CPU utilization on both machines. My dad's Phenom II seems to have single thread using almost 50% of the CPU and my mom's i3 has 10-20% of the CPU. This seems to show that youtube is single threaded and phenom ii seems to be not powerful enough for the decoding, or maybe YT uses newer codec that his machine not support with the video card and his CPU does not support some instruction that helps decoding.

Am I understanding this correctly? I have a spare 4 core Phenom II X4 960T but I don't think it will help if YT is single threaded. I also am not sure if getting a newer lower end video card will help too much vs a totally new machine (maybe move the SSD over, that's all).

If new machine, I am thinking of a Ryzen 3 + 16GB DDR4 + mATX B450 MB, or a prebuild machine of similar spec. Seems like everything is expensive these days so if possible I'd rather wait till the pandemic is over so production picks up and cost go back down. I am not interested in buying a used machine because it might be headache supporting him. He always assume used or refurb machines are unreliable.
 
Please pardon what might be a stupid question: Is he watching **some sort of official NBA stream**? If not, he'll be a the mercy of the encoding prowess of whomever is uploading to YouTube. Might you supply a URL if the stream is not a paid subscription?

There will likely, too, be differing visual artifacts if the stream is being compromised due to a lack of CPU/ GPU horsepower (that'd probably look OK but would skip frames), a lack of bandwidth (YT likely detecting low bandwidth and lowering resolution) and poor encoding ("quilting" and other compression losses such as jerky motion).

YT's codec should be h264. I could see h265 giving a modest system trouble.

EDIT: I just tried searching for "720 NBA streams" and came across several channels (none branded "NBA") that were broadcasting streaming in 720p at 60fps. That's a lot more bandwidth and a lot more GPU overhead, and failures at that frame rate would manifest as jerkiness.
 
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His hardware is old and slow, but it should be sufficient to watch youtube videos. Before we got Chromecasts and Firesticks and other streaming gizmo's, our home theater PC used a Celeron G560 which is pretty much identical in performance to a your dad's CPU and it had no problem playing high def content including YouTube.

I would try to give his machine a "tune up"... uninstall as much bloatware (software and browser plugins) as he will permit. As for the content, I went and found the "NBA" channel on youtube and played a few. The quality of the video was just OK, but it wasn't choppy for me.
 
Take out the 4GB RAM stick, as odd as that sounds, and see if that helps with the smoothness.
 
Yes, it is an "official" NBA channel video at 720p that we search via nba game today. It skip frames but it is watchable on my dad's machine, but my mom's laptop is smooth.

I also tried searching a 1080p test video , and this one is even worse. My mom's laptop will play it fine at about 20% CPU but my dad's would be at 100% and lagging / stuttering / skipping frames.

Back to back comparison and browser testing (Edge, Firefox, Chrome) shows that it is really the machine, not the browser setting. It also seems like it is about VP9 or HEVC codec that now uses either hardware acceleration after 2015's debut, or more CPU power of more recent processors in software decoding.

Based on what I see here, seems like either a new platform (CPU, MB, RAM, integrated graphics) or a new video card that has these decoding (GTX 1050 Ti), even if it is a slower CPU like Celeron / Pentium, as long as it has the newer iGPU that helps decoding them in hardware would be sufficient.

As he has fiber, with speed test of about 600mbps, it has to be the video decoding that cause the problem.
 
uc50ic4more said:
Please pardon what might be a stupid question: Is he watching **some sort of official NBA stream**? If not, he'll be a the mercy of the encoding prowess of whomever is uploading to YouTube. Might you supply a URL if the stream is not a paid subscription?

There will likely, too, be differing visual artifacts if the stream is being compromised due to a lack of CPU/ GPU horsepower (that'd probably look OK but would skip frames), a lack of bandwidth (YT likely detecting low bandwidth and lowering resolution) and poor encoding ("quilting" and other compression losses such as jerky motion).

YT's codec should be h264. I could see h265 giving a modest system trouble.

EDIT: I just tried searching for "720 NBA streams" and came across several channels (none branded "NBA") that were broadcasting streaming in 720p at 60fps. That's a lot more bandwidth and a lot more GPU overhead, and failures at that frame rate would manifest as jerkiness.
Click to expand...

From what I heard YT migrated from h264 to VP9 or HEVC due to MPEG patent trolling, and got every new browser vendors and Netflix behind the HEVC / VP9 support.
 
Latest update:

I stumble upon a Bestbuy deal, AMD Ryzen 7 4700G (8 cores / 16 thread) 8GB DDR4, 256GB NVMe SSD, for $449. I think this is great for what will keep him happy for another 5-6 years at least.

Mom and I ordered it for him as a surprise / present. I'll see if my daughter can use his old Phenom II X2, this will also discourage her from watching too much youtube... :)
 
That cpu should be fine to stream 1080, several years ago I had bought my dad a lenovo thinkserver that came with an amd dual core cpu that was something along the lines of a business class cpu but it basically crosses over to the phenom ii x2 but I had an extra 720 laying around so I swapped it out for the triple core, the 720 was the exact same cpu speed and cache that came with the lenovo but gives you the extra core.

Main thing when troubleshooting check to see if everything is up to date, no malware or any other software that could be causing issues. I think the fire pro is a workstation gpu and typically not the best which do not come with a lot of the features that a main stream card has especially for gaming, if the rest of the pc checks out ok that's what I would upgrade first.

The 960t was a beast of a cpu in it's day and I bought one from Newegg on sale back when they were phasing them out but haven't even used it yet. If you don't want to give yours up I'm sure you can pick something used off eBay for cheap. I know mostly nvidia cards, you can get a 1030 gt that is a single slot and also doesn't require the additional pcie power connectors either. I'm sure amd has something similar I'm just not too familiar with their line up.
 
Merek, I agree. My daughter was able to play 720p video fine on her Core 2 Duo Dell laptop (E6500 or is it 5500), with DDR2 800 memory too. I clearly see that the CPU utilization when the Phenom II x2 is only about 50% but it is dropping frames in sport video. The C2D came with HD graphics and from my understanding hardware video decoding. Both my dad's onboard 780g graphics or the fire pro 2270 do not have vp9 decoding, and must rely on CPU power.

I was briefly thinking about using a 1030 as an upgrade, but due to the GPU shortage its price was up to about $90 on eBay, used. So it really doesn't make sense. My father also had a lot of bad luck with used and refurb hardware in the past, so I'd rather get new stuff for him. At least if something is not going right we know it is not abused in the past. This also include no open box customer return with warranty.

The HP Ryzen 7 4700G machine I got was a good deal. I caught it on sale for $450 (8GB DDR4 and 256GB SSD) and bought it right away. It went up to $500 the next morning and is now at about $700. For this price I just went ahead and move him to a new machine, and will likely part out the machine and move all the valuable components to build a 960t, or sell them all on ebay.
 
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Honestly I would trust a used card off Ebay before a refurb unit, I have had pretty good luck buying used parts off there especially when you're dealing with an older system where new parts just doesn't exist. I have a 1030 and it's a decent card, easily enough to stream 1080p and some light gaming, I've been using it in my Thinkserver but finally upgraded the psu but now have an rtx 2060 with the 1030 as a dedicated physx card. I have an older Lenovo x200t that for the most part can stream 720, it has an Intel dual 1.8ghz but it struggles to do 1080p but does a lot better when I plug it in and not using wireless which is an Intel wireless N card using the 5ghz band. The Dell's were a crapshoot, I've upgraded many that came with their own branded wifi cards with Intel which made a huge improvement.

Really right now with everything that's going on prices have gone through the roof and low inventory on this stuff. I got lucky when I bought the psu and 2060 from Evga, I couldn't get what I wanted from Newegg and that's the only cards that I use but first time using one of their power supplies but it's been great so far.

The cpu that the other Thinkserver originally came with was an AMD Phenom ii x2 b53, I'm currently using a TS-140 which is an Intel Xeon quad core. I was having problems with my last AMD build and sold the Ryzen 7 2700x, motherboard and psu to a friend so he could get into some gaming, I've since bought the Ryzen 9 3900xt but still need to get another board for this one.
 
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This shortage is ridiculous. I was thinking about getting a 1650 super early last year when it was around $150 or so. Now everywhere is OOS and ebay for like $300.

My Ryzen 3 2200g, bought for $80 on Black Friday, is probably going to eBay $120 now too. To get what you want you pretty much have to buy a pre-build machine and part it out.
 
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