Upgrade Tip: Broadcom Crystal HD for Full HD 1080p on your netbook

For a thousand rupees, you can upgrade your netbook with a Broadcom Crystal HD chip that will make it capable of rendering full 1080p videos. Don't believe us?
Gadgetted has plenty of pictures to attest, after upgrading the HP Mini 110, which has a free PCI-e slot with the BCM970012 chip, purchased from eBay for $22. The Crystal HD Decoder reduces load on the CPU and onboard graphics, and has a TDP of just two watts - more power efficient than an ION netbook. And not to mention cheaper. A HD capable HP Mini 110 netbook for Rs 17,500. Not bad! Connect this to a HDTV that has VGA input, and you can view HD videos at 1920 x 1088 resolution. The Crystal HD chip will be available on ExpressCard and PCIe x1 cards in the future, which means that nettops, Eee Boxes and older Intel Mac Minis could also get this much needed upgrade.

For Intel Pinetrail based systems, (Atom N450+ Intel NM10 Express chipset) the Broadcom BCM70015 Crystal HD chip does the trick. It supports standard and high definition content in multiple formats (H.264/AVC, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV9, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid and AVS). The Crystal HD chip also provides software support for Adobe Flash Player (v10.1), Windows Media Player (v12), as well as support for other third-party media players,  both commercial and open source.

This upgrade is an undertaking only for the bravest of geeks.For those who don't want to do surgery on their netbook, there's the HP Mini 210 HD, and the Dell Mini 10, which have an optional Broadcom Crystal accelerator. Both should be able to play 1080p content smoothly from the hard drive, and do 720p on YouTube. According to Engadget “The Mini 210 didn't have any issues playing back a 720p Avatar trailer on YouTube, but unlike the Dell Mini 10 it had issues going up to the 1080p setting.” The Mini 210 was able to play HD video for close to five hours on a single charge.

 

Update: the HP Mini 210 HD with the Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator is currently priced at Rs 20,990 + taxes in India.