[mythtv-users] Anyone using mythtv on Athlon64 system ?

[Martin Ebourne]

On Sat, 2004-10-16 at 00:23, Maarten wrote:
> So how fast does it feel in native 64bit mode ?  I've read some horror stories 
> about the athlon 64 speed in a laptop forum where they basically said it 
> 'felt' like a pentium III.  That was not encouraging, even if that was 
> probably just some bug in specific hardware (reportedly ACPI-related).

Very fast. It compiles fast and it feels fast, feels noticeably better
than similar Pentium systems to me, and seems to run cooler too. Most of
the speed tests I've seen give it an extra 10% or so over 32 bit mode.

> But since I do software-encoding, no PVRx50s here, I'd sure like to know if 
> the eventual upgrade to an athlon 64 is worthwhile, both stability- and 
> speed-wise.  It would be awesome to be able run two bttv cards at full 720 
> resolution :-)   (yeah, I know that may be over-optimistic...)

Well on my system with budget DVB card (Nova-T) and no hardware help,
running at 1280x1024 (with Xv) it was using around a third of the
processor watching live tv. Now I've got it on the G550 tv-out (640x480)
with no kind of acceleration at all it's running at about 47% usage.

So I think two tv cards would be very possible. I think it's an Athlon64
3000 I've got.

Cheers,

Martin.