Ongoing How fast CPU have your Media Portal HTPC? (1 Viewer)

[dcwp]

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started building my HTPC and I went with a Celeron D 3.2 GHz. It's way more power than I ever need and it's kind of hard to cool. On the plus side, it was really cheap and helped me build a decent system for under 400 USD so that's a plus. If I had it to do again I'd go with a lower clocked AMD chip I think.

I'm curious about Dual Core processors. Are they worth the money? My MP system seldom does more than one processor-intensive thing at a time and the Vid card/GPU handles a lot of the complicated things that it does.

What's the best place to spend extra money on an HTPC? Faster hdds? Graphics card? Silent cooling?

 

[recoil]

AMD Sempron 2800+
1GB ram

Runs fine no probs, moive/dvd/music playback only

 

[NickName]

I have a few MP setups starting from a 1GHZ pentium through to a Dual Core. The Dual is my main MP box and it rocks. I can remote desktop into it without affecting the TV/people watching it. I can convert to DVDs to MP4 whilst it is recording TV and also synchronise Music & Photos to it over the LAN without any issue.
As I have wife and four kids it is 'critical' that my playing with this box does not affect them ;-)
I don't really have an issue with noise as when the TV/Music/DVD, etc. are playing you can't hear any PC noise.
I did get sick of running out of disk space (for recordings) so I put 1 terabyte of HDs in it. That's great as I am converting all my DVDs to MP4 and storing them on it. No more hunting for DVDs for the kids!

Hope this helps,

Nick Name

 

[SmokeWatcher]

Pentium 4, 3.2 GHz

 

[TOTMS]

Right now, Athlon XP 2600+ @ 2.4 Ghz. I should point out that I had a P3 800Mhz in a working media portal build running before

 

[johnstonson]

I've scraped together a box with a 800ghtz PIII, 128 RAM. Gforce 440mx. Playback of video content is good... but MP interface runs really slowly - 30seconds to get from main window to a sub menu...now that i've seen guys out there running even slower boxes i have hope. Any suggestions??

 

[NickName]

I've scraped together a box with a 800ghtz PIII, 128 RAM. Gforce 440mx. Playback of video content is good... but MP interface runs really slowly - 30seconds to get from main window to a sub menu...now that i've seen guys out there running even slower boxes i have hope. Any suggestions??

Hi JohnJonson,

Your main problem is RAM. XP requires 256meg RAM just to run itself BEFORE you think about running any programs (like MP). You need at least 512 meg although 1 gig is better if you want minimise drive usage.
It's never going to perform well with 128meg and the graphics card needs to support DirectX 9 as well. I don't remember if a GeForce 440 MX supports DirectX 9 but as I think it was released well before DirectX 9 existed, I doubt it does.

Sadly I don't really buying RAM is an option as it will be really expensive for an old system like that. Maybe you can get 2nd hand RAM from a market or recyclers?

I bet your hard drive is being thrashed the whole time is running and it takes forever to boot?
NOTE; I have a 1GHZ pentium running MP but it has 512meg RAM so it performs (just) 'OK'.

 

[tonyscha]

I just got into this HTPC stuff, so I used my very first computer I ever built for the project.

Specs

Dual p3 1.26GHz
DDR 768 Ram
120 Gig Harddrive
Nvidia 6200 ( just added this)
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 MCE ( on its way yet, should be here in 2 days)
Thermaltake Tenor Black Case

Basicly When I first set it up, I used it as a media player, Now I am working on maybe doing video recording, hopefully it works

*EDIT - UPDATE*
I updated my computer a while ago, made my desktop into my htpc.
New specs
AMD 64 939 3200+ ( going to update tonight to X2 - 4200+)
1 GIg of Ram
250 Gig Harddrive
Nvidia 7900 GS
Hauppague PVR-150
Kworld Tv-Plus-120
Thermaltake Tenor Black Case

 

[SciDoctor]

Dual P3 500 Slot1 on an old bx server board with AGPx2 running 9500pro Radeon.
1GB ddr sytem ram and the dual cpu makes all threaded tasks so smooth compared to a single cpu set-up.

no problems with multiple stream recording/streaming even ehile watching good guailty high bit SD content (I know HD content wouldn't work)

This runs w2ksp4 and the TV.3 server/client with three dvb-t tuners like a dream; smooth and responsive.

The only addition was sata pci card with e-sata which is used for the recording directories 2x 500GB.

 

[NLS]

well GHz poll is not very smart (with the AMD and the Cure2...)