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

[Brian Wood]

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A bit out of date but the concepts are of course still valid.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.