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

Phil Bridges gravityhammer at gmail.com
Mon Mar 5 17:47:43 UTC 2007


On 3/5/07, Steven Adeff <adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/4/07, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> > On Mar 4, 2007, at 6:22 PM, Yan Seiner wrote:
> > > Steven Adeff napsal(a):
> > >> If your motherboard supports it, you can try overclocking the
> > >> Sempron,
> > >> you probably don't need much to get it decoding 1080i.
> > >
> > >    I tried that.  Seems that the limitation isn't the CPU clock
> > > cycles,
> > > it's the pitiful cache that AMD put on the chip (128K L2 and no L1).
> > > Basically, the CPU spins its wheels waiting on data.  More wheel
> > > spinning isn't going to help.  :-(
> > >
> > > Also, that mobo has only one stick of DDR400 memory.  Would there
> > > be any
> > > advantage to a second stick?  (Other than more ram, of course.)  The
> > > system has 512MB RAM.  If I can improve performance for < $100 well
> > > enough to run HD, I'll be happy.
> >
> > 1GB RAM would of course be nice but if you're not doing anything else
> > it should be enough for playback, use free or top to see if you're
> > swapping excessively though.
> >
> > If you *really* want to know more about RAM and HD decoding check out:
> >
> > http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chenhan/papers/icme2002t.pdf
> >
> > A bit out of date but the concepts are of course still valid.
> >
> > I seriously doubt that CPU will do what you want though.
>
> yea, I'm gunna have to agree with Brian here (per usual...). I would
> assume a 3000+ on a frontend only machine should be fine for HD,
> though I wonder if its enough to enable Bob during playback?

I run an A64 3000+ frontend/backend doing HDTV fine without XVMC.  I
believe my X/mythfrontend CPU usage stays around 50-60% while watching
live.  IIRC, I don't have any deinterlacers working, but I'd have to
check my machine to be sure.


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