[mythtv-users] Dual or Single core Athlon64 for MythTV front-end machine

Raymond Wagner raymond at wagnerrp.com
Sat Jan 31 19:00:18 UTC 2009


Dale Pontius wrote:
> I'm putting together a dedicated MythTV front-end machine, and at the
> moment am picking the CPU, going through the 45W choices at Newegg.
>
> Prime Candidates would be the X2 2350, and the single-core 1640.  The
> former is of course dual-cored, clocked at 1.9GHz, with twin 512k L2.
> The latter is clocked at 2.6GHz with 1M L2.
>   
A 1.9Ghz A64 will be sufficient to play back ATSC broadcasts, while at 
the same time running one or two commflags at better than real time.  On 
the other side, the 2.6GHz chip is still to slow to play higher bitrates 
coming out of an HDPVR.

Back to VDPAU, it really makes processing capability irrelevant.  All 
video decoding is done on the card, leaving the processor to do whatever 
commflagging/transcoding/other jobs you want.  Better to get the dual 
core chip here too.  Also, unless you intend to play games on this card, 
don't bother with an 8500.  Grab one of the newer revision 8400s 
(~550MHz as opposed to the older 450MHz usually indicates G98) or a 
9300/9400 chip.  Nice to have around on the off chance you come across 
some VC1 you want to play.


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