Thinking of going multi-seat H/W for playback (1 Viewer)

[Benoire]

I've currently got an HTPC with a PhenomII tricore, 430GT and 12GB Ram (amongst other things). This would make a pretty decent server for HD recording, streaming, transcoding and general WHS2011 work. I also have a Core2Duo 2.4GHz with 2GB Ram floating around spare.

Would the Core2Duo with an additional 2GB Ram (total 4GB) and the GT430 be enough to decode 1080i streams without lost frames? Would be served by a small SSD and Gigabit Ethernet.

Thanks in advance!

Chris

 

[kiwijunglist]

Yes the GT430 theoretically should be fine with 1080i HDTV, some people have trouble with this card, but if you have a correct setup/codecs/drivers it "should" be ok for your client. It would probably be ok with 2GB of ram, but 4gb would be a lot better for Win7 + MP.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4380/discrete-htpc-gpus-shootout/10

 

[Benoire]

Hey mate,

To clarify, this is card is already in my HTPC running the Phenom II. I know it can decode 1080i as it is doing that right now. Would it be ok paired with a Core2Duo 2.4Ghz? I presume with Cuda enabled, it will offload to the GPU so the CPU shouldn't matter as long as it is fast enough to run windows 7.

 

[kiwijunglist]

Yes I think E6600 is plenty fast enough with gpu offload. Would recommend a fresh install of windows 7 with nothing else on the PC except for Mediaportal + the codecs.

 

[Benoire]

That is the plan, simply a client front end do the heavy work and put the grunty cpu as a server for all my HD needs... I might give the system a go and try it out to see...

 

[kiwijunglist]

I've run an earlier version of MP singleseat with a HD4670 and a much slower CPU (AMD X2-4200) in the past, and I was able to do 1080i HDTV so based on that I think your E6600 should have no problems.

 

[TLD]

Keep in mind that you'll be fat better off with a wired gigabit lan rather that a wireless.

 

[hafblade]

The core 2 duo is enough. I'm using one with the same graphicscard.

 

[kiwijunglist]

Yes, wired ethernet is definitely a lot better than wireless, however you don't need gigabit lan speeds, standard ethernet (100Mbit/s) is fine.

 

[SciDoctor]

From personal testing the critical connection is wired from the server to the router (pref Gigabit) then wifi (the best you can get) to the clients seems no problem.

I have 3 wifi clients set up like this and HD streaming to each has been without issues.