[mythtv-users] hardware upgrade advice

[Steven Adeff]

On 5/5/07, Brian <blistmail at comcast.net> wrote:
> >       Asus A8N-Deluxe MB (VIA chipset)
> >       Athlon 64 3400+
> >       1 Gig RAM
> >       GeForce 5600 video card
> >       ATA HD with root and OS installed
> >       SATA HD's for recordings/videos
> >
> >       My box works awesome for everything except HD.  I have XvMC working
> and my CPU generally hovers around 60% when watching a >1080i channel.  It
> plays smooth most of the time, but still seems to stutter every once in a
> while. Once it starts stuttering it
> >gets bad for a few minutes, then generally goes away.  Sometimes if I stop
> and restart the recording (or live TV) it will get
> >better.  From what I've seen, it seems like my 3400 *should* be enough to
> handle HD without XvMC, but run better with it.  It
> >stutters horribly without it, and some with it, so I'm thinking that is my
> problem.  However, I've seen people have problems with
> >the VIA chipset also.  FWIW, I can't use the VIA XvMC setting in TV >
> Playback, it stutters worse than without XvMC, but Standard
> >XvMC works OK.
>
> Possibly the VIA chipset? I dunno. I can only share my recent experience. I
> ran HD successfully on an Asus A8N-VM with an Athlon 64 4000 CPU and a very
> slow 5400rpm 120Gb HDD scaling to fit a 1280x1024 screen without XvMC. Not
> sure if the 1280x1024 screen taxes the box any more or less. I did not test
> this outputting to my HDTV. HD content was seemless while using an Athlon 64
> 3200 as well. (same m/b)
>
> This was Fedora Core 6 with the 9755 nVidia driver. I just followed Jared's
> guide and it worked like a charm. I set the system up to briefly test
> Firewire recording for a proof of concept. I had problems with Firewire
> (Motorola DCT-3416) and I'm waiting for my cable company to drop a DCT-6200
> off for testing.
>
> So I think it's possible to do HD with the processor you have. eBay has used
> Asus A8Ns and A8N-VMs for under $40 IIRC.

your processor should be more than fine I have a 3200 without xvmc,
even when it was my combined frontend and backend the cpu use was
never bad. I agree it could be the via chipset, you may want to bite
the bullet and grab a better motherboard, I'd suggest one with an
nforce chipset, I've got one nforce3 and one nforce4 and both work
great.

as for scaling, its all done by Xv so the hard part is decoding the
file, doesn't really matter what resolution you play back at.

-- 
Steve
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