[mythtv-users] Upgrade old or cut my losses and buy new?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Sunday 04 March 2007 14:55:45 Brian Wood wrote:
> On Mar 4, 2007, at 12:20 PM, Yan Seiner wrote:
> > I'm in search of HD...  My cheapie Sempron 3000 CPU just won't do HD.
> > It's clocked at 1.8 GHz and has a 128K L2 cache.
>
> Not surprising, that seems to be the accepted wisdom that that CPU
> won't do HD. There's a reason you can buy that CPU new for $30 these
> days (it was $40 last week).
>
> > I can get an Athlon 64 3000+ that will fit the mobo for $60; it has
> > 512K
> > L2 cache and is clocked 20% faster than the Sempron, at 2.00 GHz.
>
> It should almost certainly work. Jarod Wilson has said he's getting
> good results with a CPU in that class. I'm getting good HD playback
> with a Opteron 165 clocked at 1.8 Ghz., although that's a dual-core
> chip so it's not really a fair comparison.
>
> (If I'm putting words in your mouth Jarod smack me, but you've said
> that many times IIRC.

No smacking, that's absolutely correct. I've got both an A64 3500 (socket 939, 
primary HDTV frontend) and an A64 2900 (socket 754, shuttle cube demo box) 
that play back HDTV just peachy, and are barely sweating -- the latter now 
using an XGI Volari video card w/open drivers, no less... :)

> Even if the Athlon 3000 will work, which it should, you are still
> putting money into a system that's basically obsolete, or at least
> will be so far sooner than a socket 939 box.
>
> It's really a question of spend it now or spend it later, and what
> your budget will allow. I can't recall ever hearing anyone complain
> about having too much CPU horsepower.

Me neither. Speaking of which, I've got a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with dual 
quad-core xeons to spin up here in just a bit... :)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com