Ongoing New HTPC - New Zealand Freeview (1 Viewer)

[Owlsroost]

I have no personal experience of them, but if you are interested in using the on-board GPU, look at the i3-2105 & 2125 - these have the more powerful HD3000 GPU.

Note that the i3 'T' versions are basically TDP reduced by limiting the maximum CPU and GPU clock frequencies, so they are slower than the equivalent non-T versions.

That said, even the slowest Sandy Bridge i3 is still a blazing fast and power efficient CPU - perfect HTPC power

Tony

 

[TommySharp]

That makes me wonder if I could manually throttle things back to give me the same effect on a non "T" version as I can't seem to find any of those processors here in NZ.

 

[Owlsroost]

Take a look at Official Sandy Bridge / LGA1155 for HTPCs Thread - Page 50 - AVS Forum and the following posts

Tony

 

[Owlsroost]

Just to give you an idea of what a low-end i3 is capable of, the laptop I'm writing this on uses a previous generation i5-460M - this is dual-core with hyper-threading @ 2.5GHz (four virtual cores), so probably quite similar in performance to an i3-2100T/2120T.

Playing 1440 x 1080i H.264 HDTV content in MP using LAV Video decoder in software-only mode, it uses about 25% of total CPU - or you could say it eats HD video decoding for breakfast....

Tony

 

[TommySharp]

Hit the buy now button on some kit last night so will let you know what it all is once it turns up....


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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-36.876773,174.782047

 

[TommySharp]

Dave that video demo of the voice control is awesome...!!!

Can you get it to go so many commands without getting it wrong????

 

[Bleazle]

Dave that video demo of the voice control is awesome...!!!

Can you get it to go so many commands without getting it wrong????

Yeah, pretty much, it's very good. Unfortunately the voice that's included with W7 doesn't sound as good as the one James has but it's OK. The only issue I've had is with using ASIO4ALL and VoxCommando, it kills the sound (just for Music) so I'll be looking at getting that sorted because I don't really want to play music without using ASIO4ALL - but back to VoxCommando - being able to say "find movie Hancock" or "play some classic rock or "play song set fire to the rain" etc is awesome it's even better when you can ask yr HTPC if you've heard the song before or who the artist is etc and "she" tells you (I can do that on the client in my kitchen because it doesn't run ASIO4ALL). Once you've got your latest project sorted I recommend giving the free version a go - you'll soon see how easy it is to go through 25 commands....

 

[TommySharp]

Hey dave, we will have to so sort out a visit to your place to see it all working.... One thing for sure is that I'll bring along my new HTPC for you guys to help me out with a few things...

 

[Owlsroost]

Hit the buy now button on some kit last night so will let you know what it all is once it turns up....


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I am here: Google Maps

So what did you actually go for in the end ? (just curious )

Tony

 

[TommySharp]

Well I ended up getting the following internals....

Motherboard - Intel DH67BL - Great little board with USB3, Sata3, HDMI and eSata
CPU - i3 2120
RAM - 2GB
HDD System - Patriot Torqx 2 32GB SATA SSD
DVD Writer

So far the system is running pretty well on the test bench. Freeview HD is fantastic compared to my old system with all it's dropped frames. The internal HD2000 in the i3 seems to handle it no problem and I didn't even load any codecs.... Just went with the MP defaults and didn't change anything....

I do get some error about memory exceptions if I flick about the channels a bit so need to look into that and also if I stop and start tv a few times I'll start getting errors about codecs like MP has forgotten how to play things even though it played them fine two seconds ago.

Am having a few headaches trying to get the case's internal IR receiver to play nice with MP. Works great with Media Centre so must just be a software issue somewhere.