I have been given two slightly old motherboards, one of which will be turned into a HTPC (home theatre PC.)
I already have a Scaleo E up and running connected to my LCD TV. It can play *some* HD content but others it stutters badly on. I use VLC and smplayer on XP. It used to be connected to an old CRT, and it did its job well on there, but the HDTV upgrade puts strain on it, even at 720p. Although surprisingly it can play a 1080p sample file encoded a WMV; but a 2 minute clip is 105 MB, which makes me suspect it has a poor compression ratio.
So, I have two motherboards/setups available to me. The budget for this project is nearly zero, as I wish to use these computers as is. I may spend a bit on the HDD as I don't have a spare SATA but that is basically it. I have built my home theatre for very little, less than £200 total (including the 42" LCD which cost £25), so I'd like to keep it that way - I'm a cheapskate!
The requirement is for the computers to be able to play 1080p HD video of almost every format with no stuttering or dropped frames. With 5.1 surround sound. The OS will be Windows XP, or Windows 7 if newer features need to be utilised (but I like XP more than 7, so I'd prefer to stick with it.) Ideally, I could also play some older games on it (Far Cry 1, etc) although my Scaleo could also manage Far Cry (but only on minimum.)
Also, ideally the computer will be quiet. So I will be attempting to adjust the fan speed. Even if that means inserting a resistor in line with the fan +ve - I can live with the CPU running at around 60°C.
Okay; the computers:
One has an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard with a Intel P4 hyperthreading clocked at about 3.2 GHz (can't remember exactly.) To Windows it has two cores so might be good for dual core decoding. I think the processor is 64 bit but I cannot confirm. The graphics slot is an AGP type, so I'm stuck with an old Radeon graphics card. I'll try and get full details of this machine once I fire it up. 3 GB RAM, standard 400 MHz stuff. It has 2 SATA ports, both support RAID I believe.
Another has an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with an AMD Athlon64 FX-58 processor and I think it is clocked at 2.8 GHz. It is a single core processor, no hyperthreading (or whatever the AMD equivalent is.) It has dual PCI-E x16 ports (although an adapter for dual cards, so each is only x8 I think when you have two cards?) as well as smaller PCI-E slots for peripherals and some additional legacy PCI slots. I have an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS I can put in it (not a particularly high performance card.) It too has 3 GB of RAM, but I am planning to upgrade it to 4 GB. The RAM is some fancy Corsair XMS type, and it has heat spreaders, which makes me think it is fairly high performance. It has 8 SATA ports; 4 are RAID compatible.
Both have 7.1 surround sound on board and at least 100 Mb/s networking; I think the A8N-SLI has 1 Gb/s. However my network is 100 Mb/s at the moment and that suffices for streaming 1080p from PC to PC, so it doesn't really matter to me.
I'm leaning towards the A8N-SLI, however the P4P800-E is already in a case so it will be easier to use that one. I plan to use a Thermaltake 480W (550W peak) power supply to run the whole setup, replacing a cheap 400W in the original case.
I know enough about computers to build them and fix them, but I don't want to build one computer and find it is inadequate, so I'd like some advice. Which will be best for my task?
Thanks,
Tom
I already have a Scaleo E up and running connected to my LCD TV. It can play *some* HD content but others it stutters badly on. I use VLC and smplayer on XP. It used to be connected to an old CRT, and it did its job well on there, but the HDTV upgrade puts strain on it, even at 720p. Although surprisingly it can play a 1080p sample file encoded a WMV; but a 2 minute clip is 105 MB, which makes me suspect it has a poor compression ratio.
So, I have two motherboards/setups available to me. The budget for this project is nearly zero, as I wish to use these computers as is. I may spend a bit on the HDD as I don't have a spare SATA but that is basically it. I have built my home theatre for very little, less than £200 total (including the 42" LCD which cost £25), so I'd like to keep it that way - I'm a cheapskate!
The requirement is for the computers to be able to play 1080p HD video of almost every format with no stuttering or dropped frames. With 5.1 surround sound. The OS will be Windows XP, or Windows 7 if newer features need to be utilised (but I like XP more than 7, so I'd prefer to stick with it.) Ideally, I could also play some older games on it (Far Cry 1, etc) although my Scaleo could also manage Far Cry (but only on minimum.)
Also, ideally the computer will be quiet. So I will be attempting to adjust the fan speed. Even if that means inserting a resistor in line with the fan +ve - I can live with the CPU running at around 60°C.
Okay; the computers:
One has an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard with a Intel P4 hyperthreading clocked at about 3.2 GHz (can't remember exactly.) To Windows it has two cores so might be good for dual core decoding. I think the processor is 64 bit but I cannot confirm. The graphics slot is an AGP type, so I'm stuck with an old Radeon graphics card. I'll try and get full details of this machine once I fire it up. 3 GB RAM, standard 400 MHz stuff. It has 2 SATA ports, both support RAID I believe.
Another has an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with an AMD Athlon64 FX-58 processor and I think it is clocked at 2.8 GHz. It is a single core processor, no hyperthreading (or whatever the AMD equivalent is.) It has dual PCI-E x16 ports (although an adapter for dual cards, so each is only x8 I think when you have two cards?) as well as smaller PCI-E slots for peripherals and some additional legacy PCI slots. I have an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS I can put in it (not a particularly high performance card.) It too has 3 GB of RAM, but I am planning to upgrade it to 4 GB. The RAM is some fancy Corsair XMS type, and it has heat spreaders, which makes me think it is fairly high performance. It has 8 SATA ports; 4 are RAID compatible.
Both have 7.1 surround sound on board and at least 100 Mb/s networking; I think the A8N-SLI has 1 Gb/s. However my network is 100 Mb/s at the moment and that suffices for streaming 1080p from PC to PC, so it doesn't really matter to me.
I'm leaning towards the A8N-SLI, however the P4P800-E is already in a case so it will be easier to use that one. I plan to use a Thermaltake 480W (550W peak) power supply to run the whole setup, replacing a cheap 400W in the original case.
I know enough about computers to build them and fix them, but I don't want to build one computer and find it is inadequate, so I'd like some advice. Which will be best for my task?
Thanks,
Tom
