Planning a hardware upgrade (1 Viewer)

[Charlie Whiskey]

I recently discovered MP when I was looking to build my HTPC. It's just what I wanted but never thought already available in a completed package - great job to the devs!

I built my 1st iteration machine with the following specs:
- A second-hand HP DC7900 Small Form Factor PC from eBay
- Core 2 Duo E8400
- Intel G45 chipset with integrated graphics
- 6GB DDR2 RAM
- Boot drive is an old 500GB 5400rpm drive
- Data drive is a brand new 4TB WD Red NAS drive (Windows doesn't like it as the boot drive - system not UEFI capable)
- Kaisers Baas TV Stick Duo as the tuner (dual DVB-T. on a USB port)
- TV is a Samsung 55" Full HD.

The system gives me stutter-free totally acceptable TV and DVD watching performance, even if it's also recording a different channel in the background. However if I'm to stream to a mobile phone (over local 802.11n Wifi) as I watch TV at the same time the maximum acceptable quality is FFmpeg medium - over that either the phone or TV playback start to stutter or totally freeze once in a while. The machine is also expected to have other roles such as eBay snipping and torrent download and is planned to have a Bluray drive in the future.

QUESTION: I'm planning an upgrade and is wondering where to put my money.

OPTIONS:
1. Relocate the boot drive to an SSD
2. Buy a discrete graphics card - had in mind a Radeon R7 240. Anything over that I'm running into power constraint from the not-economically-upgradable 240W PSU.
3. Upgrade the CPU to Q9550S (same wattage requirement as the current E8400 as I understand it)
4. Even more RAM
5. Something else?

Your opinions appreciated!

 

[mhoogenbosch]

What happens to the CPU / MEM when streaming, because if the E8400 just doesn't cut it, it's recommended to invest in more CPU power. Don't know if the streaming takes more than one core, then it indeed would be usefull to upgrade the CPU.

If the memory isn't full, then it isn't a good investment, i think.

What does GPU-Z say about the load on the GPU during videoplayback. If it's running near 100%, an upgrade would be advisable, if not.. then its not a good investment either

Investing in a SSD is always a good idea.. that will give a huge performance boost during startup of the system / reboot and well, basicly everything. I'm running on a SSD for a while now and don't want to go back, never!

You really should just find the bottleneck and upgrade that. Or buy a entire new machine which is state of the art, then you know for sure there are no bottlenecks anymore

 

[gonzo90017]

I upgraded to a Q8200 @ 2.33ghz. It's enough to stream in Flash HD IF nothing else is running in the background (comskip, web surfing, etc..) So I stream in Flash HQ which looks good enough on my 10.6" Surface RT.

 

[Neild7744]

You need something with quite high processing power for the TV server. Especially when you start using HD streams.

I have a 2.4 quad core lga775 on my tv server machine with 8 gb of ddr2 ram. Looking at the diagnostics it's CPU power that's required.

This is what I'm planning on doing...

1) rebuilding my tv server PC with dual CPU EATX server board. USB 3, SATA 3...as a minimum. SSD for operating system.

2) upgrading my network switch to a better 'managed' gigabit switch.

3) using a lower powered PC for processing. For example any downloading, file processing, artwork processing and anything else similar will be done on a dedicated machine, the idea being TV server will be a dedicated machine full of processing power, ram, satellite and tv cards & hard drives only purely running MP

 

[Owlsroost]

You need something with quite high processing power for the TV server. Especially when you start using HD streams.

I have to disagree - there are people quite happily running TV server on dual-core Atom systems (just TV-server, not for playback as well).

I run a single-seat system on a old E4400 CPU (Core2Duo @ 2.2 GHz), 4GB RAM with a 250GB 2.5" boot/timeshift drive + 2TB WD 3.5" "Green" drive. It is frequently recording 2-3 HDTV streams (from a USB DVB-T2 tuner) while playing another HDTV recording (or watching live TV) with no problems.