Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

johannesg00 · 2012-09-04 18:08:56

Hello,

i'm planning to build an HTPC for my living room.
It should play videos, music and live tv (DVB-S2 card).
At the moment i'm deciding what hardware i should buy. I think a board with an AMD E-350, 4GB RAM would be fine...
Can anybody tell me how fast an AMD E-350 is? Is the E-450 much faster?
Will i be able to run emulators for the SNES or Nintendo DS?

Thank you

karol · 2012-09-04 19:41:35

johannesg00 wrote:

Is the E-450 much faster?

According to synthetic benchmarks, yes, it's much faster.

65kid · 2012-09-05 12:22:45

you might consider this: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … xbmc&num=1

better get an intel board with a cheap pentium processor, VAAPI has been working perfectly fine on all my machines. And SNES and NDS emulators should not be a problem for any CPU, even n64 should work fine.

z0id · 2012-09-05 17:15:14

I may be a bit offtopic here but I think If you build a HTPC you go for low powered and quiet, with hardware accelerated video decoding. Personally I'd go for a motherboard with a fanless Atom CPU and a Nvidia ION2 GPU, which has VDPAU feature set C. I think Zotac makes such motherboards in Mini ITX form factor (a bit expensive, though).
A motherboard with an Intel GPU might work well too, having VA-API enabled playback, but I don't have any experience with that.

65kid · 2012-09-05 17:32:19

z0id wrote:

I may be a bit offtopic here but I think If you build a HTPC you go for low powered and quiet, with hardware accelerated video decoding. Personally I'd go for a motherboard with a fanless Atom CPU and a Nvidia ION2 GPU, which has VDPAU feature set C. I think Zotac makes such motherboards in Mini ITX form factor (a bit expensive, though).
A motherboard with an Intel GPU might work well too, having VA-API enabled playback, but I don't have any experience with that.

my brother has one of those zotac boards (atom 330). It works, video playback with VDPAU is flawless, but the XBMC GUI feels a little bit sluggish compared to my Intel machine. And you really notice the CPU/GPU's limits - encryption read/write is really slow and it couldn't handle some n64 games (mupen64plus).

Intels' VAAPI may have had its problems in the past, but this has all been fixed by now. Also the drivers are open source. And afaik a cheap intel motherboard plus pentium CPU (even a celeron should work) isn't much more expensive than one those zotac or AMD boards.

The only reason to go with Atom/ION is power consumption - but trust me, it isn't worth it.

johannesg00 · 2012-09-06 10:05:08

Hey,

This is a hard decision...
Can anyone tell me what is the difference between an Intel Celeron G555 and an Intel Pentium G630? They are both dual core chips with 2.7GHz, but the pentium costs about 20€ more.
I think the HD2000 of both CPUs is a little bit slow, isn't it?
It would be fine if i could play some little games on my TV...
My Desktop PC has an Intel i5-2500K with a HD3000 graphics chip and it run's quite fine, but in some videos it's a little bit flickering (i think a problem of the VAAPI driver...)

Is the Catalyst driver so bad?
I found the AMD A4-3400 APU and it sounds quite interessting.
The CPU + Graphics + Board (with USB3 and SATA6) + 4GB RAM costs about 110€...

Strike0 · 2012-09-06 11:14:07

For the Celeron G555 (seems brand-new):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_microprocessors wrote:

HD Graphics (Sandy Bridge) contain 6 EUs as well as HD Graphics 2000, but does not support the following technologies: Intel Quick Sync Video, InTru 3D, Clear Video HD, Wireless Display, and it does not support 3D Video[citation needed].

That would make me worry, if it streams effortlessly. But then again I'm not up-to-date with the Intel marketing feature slang.

Gusar · 2012-09-06 11:39:01

Strike0 wrote:

But then again I'm not up-to-date with the Intel marketing feature slang.

This.

What does not having Quick Sync Video mean actually? That the crappy hardware encoder is missing, or that the decoder is missing too? If the decoder is missing, it makes the thing useless for a HTPC, I doubt that's the case. But with marketing speak, who knows.

masteryod · 2012-09-06 12:57:45

Intel have pretty much the best Linux video driver support, right? - especially right now with whole Valve/Steam thing coming.

There is pretty awesome i3-3225 (3.3GHz 2cores/4threads) on the horizon, the cheapest one with HD4000 IGP but it cost around $134. 55W is a lot compared to 18W in e350 but you can under-clock it to around 1.5-2GHz and it still will be much much faster then any Atom or e350/e450. GPU is also faster.

I see no Ivy Bridge Pentiums or Celerons in the near future and Sandy Bridge ones have only HD2000 IGP.

.:B:. · 2012-09-06 18:05:41

Strike0 wrote:

For the Celeron G555 (seems brand-new):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_microprocessors wrote:
HD Graphics (Sandy Bridge) contain 6 EUs as well as HD Graphics 2000, but does not support the following technologies: Intel Quick Sync Video, InTru 3D, Clear Video HD, Wireless Display, and it does not support 3D Video[citation needed].
That would make me worry, if it streams effortlessly. But then again I'm not up-to-date with the Intel marketing feature slang.

You don't need all that stuff, so you don't need to worry. Sandy Bridge CPUs should already be able to handle H.264 and MPEG-2 720p/1080p afaict.

johannesg00 · 2012-09-06 20:12:24

Does anybody know's how stable the AMD Catalyst support is for the A4-3400?
Is XvBA working in XBMC?

D4ve · 2012-09-06 22:52:18

Just for information: I have a Asus E35M1-I Deluxe Mainboard (AMD E350, USB3.0, SATAIII, WLAN, Bluetooth) and it works very well. I installed the latest catalyst drivers a few days ago including xvba and i think xvba is working with XBMC because i could play a BluRay without any lags. Also, urbanterror runs nice (60FPS@FullHD) and gnome-shell runs smooth too. But if you have the chance for a little bit more graphics power, then use it. Although all is working, it seems like the graphic is always on its limit. However, the cpu is powerful enough, most of the time it is running at 800MHz.

Oh, and with mouse, keyboard and an old 2,5" SATA HDD it takes ~30W after boot (while booting it uses a little bit more).

Hope that helps

Arch Linux

#1 2012-09-04 18:08:56

Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#2 2012-09-04 19:41:35

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#3 2012-09-05 12:22:45

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#4 2012-09-05 17:15:14

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#5 2012-09-05 17:32:19

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#6 2012-09-06 10:05:08

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#7 2012-09-06 11:14:07

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#8 2012-09-06 11:39:01

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#9 2012-09-06 12:57:45

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#10 2012-09-06 18:05:41

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#11 2012-09-06 20:12:24

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

#12 2012-09-06 22:52:18

Re: Hardware for HTPC/Perfomance of AMD E-350

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