Upgrade of my intel based HTPC - HD but no gaming

[Schroinx]

My HTPC needs an upgrade in order to play HD content in various forms. The machine needs to be fairly silent, have a low power consumtion and play HD/Blueray/H264 content in 1080p. It will not be oc'ed, nor used for gaming.

I plan on getting a 8400 cpu as it seems to be the sweet spot and it is based on 45nm process.
It will be paired with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R and two gigs of memory.

It will be put into my dvine5 case, together with a schyte mini, two 92 nexus fans, a spinpoint, an m-audio revolution 7.1, and a hauppage pvr-150. The PSU is 250 or 300w.


1) The CPU has a front side speed of 1333. What speed does the memory need to be?

2) I need a vid card for the machine, but I do not know what to choose as the 3D performance is of little importance. Picture quality, price and silence is key here.

3) Any other questions or comments are welcome.

Rgds.
/Schroinx

[jessekopelman]

1) The CPU has a front side speed of 1333. What speed does the memory need to be?

2) I need a vid card for the machine, but I do not know what to choose as the 3D performance is of little importance. Picture quality, price and silence is key here.

Rgds.
/Schroinx

1) The memory doesn't need to be any particular speed. Your best value would be 800 MHz (PC6400) as it is virtually as cheap as lower speed DDR2 and will certainly be supported by your motherboard. If no overclocking is done, you would be running a memory divider or strap of 6/5 (400 MHz memory clock vs 333 MHz FSB).

2) HD3450. As for specific card, I can't help you there.

[FlorisNielssen]

You could also take a look at this motherboard. It has integrated graphics and seems very good for a HTPC. It's an AMD motherboard and will need an AMD processor, so the total power will probably be less. But, it might also be a bit cheaper.
Take a look at the review and see for yourself.

[Schroinx]

Jesse, thanks for your suggestions. A few hours spend searching for prices and specifications today has revealed the same answers as you has provided. It is nice to be confirmed

Floris, I believe that right now Intel has the advantage compared to AMD. But thanks for the suggestion anyway. I'll look at it.

Rgds.
Schroinx

[antifro]

Floris has a point you should consider.

The AMD 780G chipset has proved itself capable of playing any HD format with very weak CPUs. The motherboards available come with HDMI and DVI outputs which will eliminate your need for a video card; cutting cost, system heat, and power consumption.

AMD systems are competitive in overall power draw, because Intel CPU's though they take less power, an Intel system overall generally uses more power than an AMD system. The price of a 780G based mobo and a mid class Athlon 64 can cost you less than an 8xxx series CPU alone.

You DID say that its a HTPC for playing HD content right? You dont need a powerfull PC for that, just the right components. Dont forget that Athlon 64's, though not close to being the most powerful still carry plenty of processing power for today's apps, especially HD content. Just something to consider.

[Schroinx]

As I can't get hold of a 8400 here in DK for the next two weeks, it might be a valid point.

The mobo cost ensentially the same, save a few bucks. I can get a 6400 X2 cpu, for the same price as a E8400. Ram is the same but I save a few bucks on the gpu, but not a lot as the 3450 is so redicules cheap.

However the 6400 uses a lot more juice under load:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/di ... html#sect0

Hence it is not good for a HTPC with a poorly ventilated case. Also I will loose the headroom in my 250-300w psu, and as I have a Dvine5 case, it cannot be changed.

Hmm, I might wait those 14 days....

But thanks anyway
Rgds.
Schroinx

[autoboy]

I don't understand why you are searching for such a powerful cpu. Is this HTPC used for anything else besides playing HD? Will you be transcoding video or anything else CPU intensive? With the HD video codecs decoded outside of the CPU, you can build a HTPC capable of BluRay playback for less than the price of the just the 8400 cpu, and you will get less heat because there is no video card required. Any dual core AMD cpu on the market today can decode HD with the help of the new generation of motherboards.

If you want to do transcoding, then the Intel chips are better suited, but you will end up spending considerably more for an Intel system. Also, there will be a time when AMD comes out with competitive tri and quad core CPUs. So if you are worried that you might need more cpu in the future, you only lost $50 in the deal on your cheapo AMD dual core.

If you really like Intel, try something like an E2200 but you will still need a graphics card for just about any Intel system because the intel motherboard video is basically crap.

[Plekto]

I'd in fact recommend looking at a Celeron 440. You want something with silly low power levels. 90% of what you are doing is based upon one thing - video card speed. I've got an old P4t533 board with 512MB on it(rambus - effectively DDR2/1066) with a P3.0 (2nd PC - works for my son's needs)

I'm using a X850Xt. It runs HD video flawlessly if that's all it's doing.

Memory and video card is the big deal here, and 800fsb is plenty - the 440 is a strong performer with very low heat. (easily passive cooled). Get lots of ram and seriously consider moving to linux as the overhead will be a lot less - virtually nothing else running in the background if you're running local networking only. Note - you actually want to look for low CAS DDR800 ram here as well - your biggest bottlenecks will be latency and your I/O on the hard drive. HD doesn't stress most modern processors if it's the only thing it's doing.

Note - Windows usually does enough crap in the background to cause some stuttering and problems unless you go seriously full-blown. This isn't the cpu or video card. It's Windows being an ass about sharing resources.

[jessekopelman]

Note - you actually want to look for low CAS DDR800 ram here as well - your biggest bottlenecks will be latency and your I/O on the hard drive.

Nothing wrong with getting low latency RAM, as long as it doesn't require unusual voltages. Stick with 1.8V for best compatibility. However, there is no way this is going to make much of a difference for video playback. Look at the testing of the 780G IGP -- using faster Hypertransport improved 3D frame rate, but did not lower CPU utilization for video playback. With modern processors, CPU speed trumps memory speed every time and memory speeds generally trump memory timings. Meanwhile, HDD I/O is only a bottleneck if you are trying to serve multiple streams of video simultaneously. Video bit rates are measured in the low tens of Mbps, while HDD I/O transfer rates are measured in the high tens of MBps and beyond. I also question why you think lots of RAM would be helpful. Unless transcoding of multiple streams is going to be going on, what would the RAM be used for? Even if you are doing multi-tuner recording, the tuner cards don't actually have much interaction with the OS or CPU. RAM is so cheap it hardly matter, but I can't see why one would need more than 2 GB, unless the machine was going to be transcoding multiple simultaneous streams.

I think a Celeron 440 is maybe aiming a little too low, if you are looking for Blu-Ray support. Testing seems to show that you need something in the realm of an AMD X2 4200+ or Intel E2180 to be completely rock solid. Happily the former is only $55 and the later only $80. If you want to go a more energy efficient way with AMD, you could get a BE-2400 for $100, or if you are of the bent to pick the right MB and experiment with undervolting, spending $90 on an X2 5000+ Black Label might be an even better way to go.

[Plekto]

The reason you need memory and a good hard drive is because if you are using windows, it sucks resources, has memory leaks, and decides to get in the way all of the time. Especially when you even turn ON networking. That means firewall, AV, yada yada... suddenly it's 2 gigs and dual cores just to read email and watch a video.

Linux, otoh, has none of that, properly configured. If you tell it to do one job, that's all it does. And that means you can get by with average ram, a 5400 rpm drive(one of the silent WDs or similar) and 1-2 gigs of memory. Of course you'll have to tweak with drivers and so on and ditch the shell immediately. KDE and Gnome are very nice, but IMO, for this, they are very "Macintosh" bloated. 512MB before you run anything is silly.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

You might want to check this out:
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/xubuntu

This is the stripped down interface. It's straightforward and uses a fraction of the CPU and RAM. Perfect for a media server or a box that you intend to only do a few things with. It runs the same software as the full-blown 512MB to boot version - just comes with none of that crap installed by default. 128MB to run. Put 1-2 gigs on your system and it'll run like windows does with 4 and like your CPU speed just doubled.

I mention this version because 1 gig of memory uses a little less heat and money out of your pocket than 2. But you'd have to ask around on their support forums to actually get an answer. If you have to buy 2 gigs, well, you're probably better off with kubuntu or the full-blown version.

Also, you'll have to get a NVidia card. No way, no how will ATI's drivers work properly for what you want to do.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_HD.html
Here's a list of cards that you need to be looking at from them. The cards with this are made specifically to offload a lot of the work to the video card and keep the CPU from breaking its back.

viewtopic.php?t=46870
Find a competant NVidia card from that list with HD and low power useage. Also ask here because video cards aren't my specialty. I just know that ATI cards and Linux are not happy campers when you put them together.

Whew.
But that aside, it's quick, fun, and brings back the "this is cool" aspect of computing that we all used to initially have. And free. If it blows up, well, you can always try again or run Windows.

[Schroinx]

Is that so?

For your information I'm writing this on a Vaio 505 with a 333MHz celeron and 192MB of memory. Running xp. It's not speedy but it gets the job done.

But please, gentlemen, don't turn my tread into a linux versus windows or amd versus intel discussion as it is irrelevant for my questions.

Fact is that decodig a video stream either requires dedicated hardware as in the gpus or raw cpu power. The former is bound to the codecs it was build for and fast at that, while the latter is brute force but is more vercitile. Amount and speed of memory and harddrive matters not in decoding of video for a screen.

Rgds.
Schroinx

[thejamppa]

Ubuntu is quite bloated these days. I like lesser resource eating distro's like: http://damnsmalllinux.org/ Damn Small Linux.

But you can Use Ati cards. UVD is still better than nVidia pure video. Ati is just more hassle to instal separate ati drivers etc. Linux has generally better nVidia support for drivers but its not that critical that you should close out Ati away.

HD 34x0 is very good series with HD 3650. nVidia has 8400 GS, 8500 GT and 8600GT/S in equal but generally they use old version of the PureVideo and not new one like 9600GT does making PureVideo inferior to UVD.

All cards are available with passive versions. They're more than enough for your needs. 8600-series and HD 3650 allow even gaming in decent level for newest games... even you can't use all graphic goodies. They still can run Crysis decently.

[Plekto]

Yeah, that works too

I just recommend Xubuntu as 128MB isn't so vastly bloated and it has a really good support base for first time users. Myself, I'm old school shell-it-runs-in-64MB.

ATI is getting better? That's nice to hear. I'm a huge fan myself of ATI.(old system was AIT, new is ATI)

Video cards aside, the truth is that almost ANY processor made today is more than fast enough to do HD. If you get the microsoft and Apple bloatware out of the damn way. A 2180 would more than suffice, though I'd go with a 2220 and underclock it if you have the money. It will run like a 2180 but with less heat and cheaper ram.

Windows will run, but it is perhaps the poorest multitasking OS made in the last decade. It really sucks at it and it's all of the background stuff that is the reason why you need such a silly amount of ram and CPU under windows. Because it has to be *fast* to get out of its way and still run well despite the myriad of processes running in the background.

Under linux, I could in theory be running one or two processes and play HD content(if I was running Damn Small Unix from a shell). Windows won't boot without.(checks) 25 or so processes. There's a reason the old TIVOs went with unix - one job, fast as possible. Their CPUs and memory are PDA level almost. Yet they worked great.

[thejamppa]

Its either Ati is getting better or nVidia is getting worse. I have used Ati and nVidia both in Ubuntu or Xubuntu and they all have behaved same way. I've generally seen no difference in picture quality or such. But on the otherhand I have never watched HD material in Linux.

I am in process testing Fluxbuntu distro. My friend said it takes a lot less resources than Ubuntu and is somewhat faster.

[autoboy]

Your thread no longer resembles the one you started. If you do not want to be bound to codecs that support HD decoding then the intel system makes sense. However, you said you were interested in picture quality, and codecs that do not support hardware are hardly good at picture quality. If you skip hardware acceleration, you also lose adaptive deinterlacing, advanced scaling, and other picture quality enhancements.

So there are two routes you can take. CPU decode where the video card matters nothing as long as it can render VMR9 at your screen resolution, and some form of hardware decode that allows you to use purevideo or Avivo but you are limited to cyberlink decoders.

It sounds like you already know what you want. For a video card, if you wanted to do Avivo at some point, I would go with the 3450 if you want low power and passive, or the 3650 if you are concerned that the 3450 might be too slow.

[smilingcrow]

Windows will run, but it is perhaps the poorest multitasking OS made in the last decade. It really sucks at it and it's all of the background stuff that is the reason why you need such a silly amount of ram and CPU under windows. Because it has to be *fast* to get out of its way and still run well despite the myriad of processes running in the background.

Under linux, I could in theory be running one or two processes and play HD content(if I was running Damn Small Unix from a shell). Windows won't boot without.(checks) 25 or so processes.

Yawn.

[Schroinx]

Auto, my tread was hijacked. For some reason someone began the linux vs ms bs and I lost interest in it as they where just ranting away. And at that point I already had made up my mind. It will be the intel setup with a 3450 card, as you stated and 800mhz memory. Now I'm just waiting for the 8400 to come in stock here in DK.

Rgds.
/Schroinx

[jessekopelman]

If you skip hardware acceleration, you also lose adaptive deinterlacing, advanced scaling, and other picture quality enhancements.

These can all be done in software by filters that sit between the codecs and the player. ffdshow, for example. I think the real issue with doing these things in software is getting the codecs, filters, and player software to work together. Hardware acceleration certainly simplifies things even while/because it eliminates some flexibility.