CPU @ or near 100% Hellllp!

[returntozork]

Hello all.

After over 2 weeks of research and messing around with settings, and hardware in my PC, I decided to reach out for some help. I am having a lot of trouble getting decent results from blu-ray playback recently. Here are my specs:

I am running a slightly upgraded Gateway GT5032 media centre PC.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2 GHz)
A Foxconn C51GU01 Motherboard
2 Gig of ram
an NVIDIA EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GT KO
2 brand new SATA HD's, 500 and 350 gb

my blu-ray player is a Sony BMU-100A
I am running Power DVD 7.3 Ultra with all the latest patches.

I am running on Windows XP on one HD and Vista Home Premium 32 on the other.

My Bios is flashed with the latest version and my Blu-ray with the latest firmware.

I had noticed a bit of over usage of the CPU in the past with this exact setup, but not enough to make the movie stop and start a lot. Recently I bought "28 weeks later" and this is where I started to notice big problems. The CPU is hitting 100 percent every few seconds, making it un-watchable. I have done clean formats and reinstalled XP about 5 times, Vista 3. For the life of me I can't seem to get this thing to work. I have tried enabling and disabling Hardware Acceleration in PowerDvd. I returned the video card to EVGA and they sent me a brand new one, same model. I have barely anything running in the background and the problem still persists. The drive reads discs fine becauseI installed XP and all my other software on it and there seem to be no problems with seek time or data. I have the latest drivers from Nvidia, even the beta's, and they dont seem to help.

The thing that is bothering me the most is I know this CPU should be able to handle HD, as should the video card. From looking at reviews of the card, all the numbers should be below or just on 50% cpu usage. So I am baffled. I cant bring myself to reinstall XP or Vista one more time and I feel like I'm at the end of the road with this issue. I was almost tempted to go out and buy a standalone player but I've spent enough money upgrading this system for me to want to get it working. Does anyone have any ideas?? I'm dying for some help here. Do I need to go out and buy a new Mobo and Chip??? That is pretty much all that is left in this PC that is orignal. If anyone can help me solve this problem I'll buy you some beer, hell I'll cook you dinner as well!

Thanks in advance for reading this.

[bootman]

All cpus need help decoding 1080p content.
Your video card is the bottle neck.

Try a GeForce 8500/8600 or Radeon HD 2600/2400.
These cards have H.264 decode process engines and will help the cpu tremendously.

the 7xxx and 88xxx series don't.
Yes even the mighty 8800 does not have dedicated H.264 processing!

A 8500 GT will be under $100
The Ati card cards also does VC-1 decode work!
Here is a nice one with optional HDMI support.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127308

There is a HTPC forum at AVS with lots of great info.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=710828

[returntozork]

Thanks for that. I will give one of these cards a shot and see if it makes a difference.