[mythtv-users] COMPARATIVE TEST: Revo R3610 vs Revo R3700 vs Intel E8500 3.16 C2Duo

[tortise]

I compared the time to load 2230 recordings on screen using wired 
Ethernet connected frontends, with slowest LAN bottlenecks of 100M 
switches (or faster)
All 3 PC's are running 16GB Kingston SSD's, 2GB RAM, the Intel is 
running an NVIDIA 8500GT and 10.04 Mythbuntu - the Revo's 10.10 
Mythbuntu, all solely frontends.

Load speeds are respectively 10 seconds, 5 seconds and 2 seconds.

The subjective interpretation is respectively, an eternity, slow and 
reasonably quick (but not instant)!
The R3700's CPU is not that much faster than the R3610's(maybe 115%), 
but is later technology (e.g. faster RAM and?) and is significantly 
faster on this test than I would have predicted given the modest CPU 
speed increase. Interestingly the heatsink in the 3700 is quite a step 
up from the 3610 to include a smart compact heat pipe arrangement.

Obviously they all play back H264 1080i content much the same, but the 
Intel will also playback live 1080i TV direct to VLC from an HDHomerun 
independently, the revo's can only do this for SD (Hardware decoding on 
VLC may be easier to implement in more recent versions possibly 
overcoming this?)

This is testing the last of 0.23 fixes, so I do not know whether this 
has been improved in the vast number of revisions since or whether some 
sort of xmlhttprequest like behaviour has been recruited to overcome 
this bottleneck of loading all the recording data before displaying it...

I hope this is of interest, especially for people considering lower 
power frontend options.