Major upgrade done

[jayrock]

Hi there,

just want to share my recent upgrade experiences.

This is where I came from

- Asus K8V-MX
- Sempron 3000+
- 512 MB RAM
- MSI Radeon 9550 SE
- Sony 32" CRT, connected via S-Video

This rig went fine for about one year until... I got myself a spanking new Sanyo PLV-Z5 beamer and connected it to the DVI of the Radeon 9550. This was great, but I noticed that when running on 1280x720 the responsiveness of the system got really bad. Also, I wasn't happy with the TV quality. It was just blurred. Then I started to play with ffdshow and got the TV picture improved. But the Sempron was getting stressed and couldn't really cope with the post processing. So, I decided to it properly and to a decent upgrade. These are the new components:

- Asus M2A-VM
- Athlon X2 3800+ EE
- 1 GB RAM

The Asus I selected because it was the only ATI 690 board that would fit in my Silverstons LC-11 case. I wanted the ATI 690 because it seemed to offer good value and quality, and also I read positive reviews. The Athlon I chose because at the time of buying it had a good performace/price ratio and it seemed to offer enough power for doing ffdshow. EE is useful in the Silverstone case because of it's limited cooling capacity.

The surprise came when I finished the rebuild: The picture quality is fantastic out of the box! It looks much better then before, however I still tried to improve it with ffdshow postprocessing. It doesn't really get better. I switched postprocessing off eventually.

Some figures:
- CPU load during TV: < 20%
- CPU temp rise during TV: approx 3° (well, measured with the on-die temp sensor)
- Power consumption during TV: 65 Watts

To summarize, for about 180€ I got a fantastic improvement in picture quality. The AMD 690 is a good solution for HTPC applications.

Hope someone finds this useful.

Cheers

/jayrock

[singer36]

Hi !

i see that your old configuration is quite similar to mine.
But i have a REAL problem, and i wonder if you ever had it with your config.

i have a regular LCD screen 1024*768 connected through VGA on my htpc.
I also have a sanyo plv-z3 in 1280*720 connected through DVI on the same htpc.

when the LCD is selected (via ATI tools), evrything is... mediaportal runs fine.
BUT when i use the sanyo beamer, everything is ok at the begining... and as soon as i stop a movie, or quit tv, i got a blue scrren for one second, and the screen crashes...
it comes back with a kind of shitty resolution 1027*768 (with black borders since it is no more 16/9)... and does not show the whole mediaportal area...

did you ever have such pb ?

i tried the 4/3 and 16/9 skins...

thanks for your answer.

[jayrock]

Hi Singer36,

sorry, I never had a dual screen configuration and therefore I have not experienced the issue you describe.

But I know that there's a lot of threads on multi screen issues in this forum, maybe you will find some useful information.

/jayrock