Intel Core i3 3225 for Client+Server (1 Viewer)

[Nindustries]

Good day,

I'm building my home setup. (link)
I was wondering: will an Intel Core i3 3225 be sufficient to offer a perfect fluent display of MP, and still offer 4 tuners via the TV Server without any problems? Or will an i5 with HD 4000 graphics be needed?
Clients will play live TV fed from the server, play Bluray disks and ofcourse grab some content from a NAS and a few plugins.

I'd love to see some numbers about those models on client/client+server setups..

PS: Why do some people install additional gpu's in htpcs?

Greetings

 

[Benoire]

I was able to serve several clients from my Phenom II x3 720 HTPC as well as playing 1080i tv. An i3 is technically superior to the chip I use.

People use discrete GPUs as they don't ahve built in gpus i.e. my Phenom II; also some cpu/gpu chips are not powerfull enough to run some of the post processing people require.

Chris

 

[kiwijunglist]

i3-3225 is a great choice for HTPC. It will be fine with doing those tasks. The i5 would be a waste of money. The actually distribution of the tv stream to clients does not need much processing power. The real work is in transcoding or displaying the tv stream. What OS is your NAS server running? It might be better to have the tv tuners in the NAS server because

1. Don't need the main HTPC on when the 2nd HTPC is watching tv.
2. main HTPC can use a smaller case and be quieter
3. Don't need the main HTPC on when recording scheduled tv
4. Use less power

The advantage of having the tvtuners in the main HTPC are
1. Slightly faster intial tuning of tv in this PC (~1sec), also sometimes channel changes are around 0.5sec faster.

As Benoire said, the main reason for discrete GPU cards is because the inbuilt GPU is too slow (mostly older CPUs). There is the additional advantage that a good discrete GPU can do better post processing and higher quality decoding/scaling etc. The recommended discrete HTPC card is HD7750 (or if adding a budget gpu because no onboard GPU, recommend HD6450).

The i5-4470T is also be a nice HTPC CPU because it will only be 35W. There is also the A6-5200 which is 15W (you could run this passive) but both of these are not released yet.

I generally recommend the AMD A6-5400 (65W) over i3-3225 (55W) because it is cheaper (AMD motherboards are also cheaper) and still does a good job. However both are good choices.

If the main HTPC is going to be a tv-server then allocate 4GB of ram for a ram drive and use it for timeshifting.

Regards
Kiwi

PS. Don't forget to donate to us

 

[Nindustries]

i3-3225 is a great choice for HTPC. It will be fine with doing those tasks. The i5 would be a waste of money. The actually distribution of the tv stream to clients does not need much processing power.

Good, I was afraid that I wouldn't get a perfect fluent client/serv. Maybe when I get my setup and I confirm everything working, I'll add it to the wiki so people can use the same hardware when not sure.

What OS is your NAS server running? It might be better to have the tv tuners in the NAS server

I'm experimenting with & will certainly run FreeNAS! So Mediaportal tv server can't be run on it :/

As Benoire said, the main reason for discrete GPU cards is because the inbuilt GPU is too slow (mostly older CPUs). There is the additional advantage that a good discrete GPU can do better post processing and higher quality decoding/scaling etc. The recommended discrete HTPC card is HD7750 (or if adding a budget gpu because no onboard GPU, recommend HD6450).

I see, thanks! Thank god the HD Graphics 4000 is powerful enough

PS. Don't forget to donate to us

When this setup is up and running, I certainly will! MP is a marvelous project.

Greetings

 

[kiwijunglist]

i3-3225 is a great choice for HTPC. It will be fine with doing those tasks. The i5 would be a waste of money. The actually distribution of the tv stream to clients does not need much processing power.

Good, I was afraid that I wouldn't get a perfect fluent client/serv. Maybe when I get my setup and I confirm everything working, I'll add it to the wiki so people can use the same hardware when not sure.

Most of the hardware is already in the wiki
http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/4_HTPC/HTPC_Hardware/Video_Cards_(GPUs)/Intel_-_Onboard_GPUs

 

[joele]

I have an i3 3225 (with HD4000) and it is a great CPU, very impressive, even the dolphin emulator which is very CPU intensive works fine (though that is on another machine, was so impressed for the price I bought a second)... The HD4000 however is garbage, for me anyway.. It is actually reletively powerful overall probably equal to better than the $35 HD6450 I replaced it with, my machine also has 1600mhz DDR3 Corsair vantage 2x4GB, windows ultimate 7 64bit and Sandisk Extreme III SSD...

The problem with the HD4000 is inconsistant performace in video playback, some videos (depending on bitrate and fps) I just really struggle to get playback not stuttering or if not stuttering then not in sync.. Core AV codec gives smooth playback but out of sync with audio by 2 seconds on some high bitrate H.264. lol, MS codec works the best on those intensive videos, but slight stutter and LAV is terrible even with hardware acceleration.. The cheap HD6450 is better with LAV with hardware acceleration but not perfect, MS codec is worse than the HD4000 but with CoreAV codec it is absolutely perfect, not bad for AUD$35 card and $9 codec... I am sure I could tweak more but not stuffing around as even is fine even side-by-side 1080p 3d which is actually 3840x1080...

I did read some people having success with the HD4000 and many having stuttering issues like I was having, so for $35 extra it just wasn't worth the headache, for me..