Yes, when talking about this I should keep in mind that this needs to be a well planned purchase when the OS is chosen to be a Linux and the GPU is an nvidia chip. Why? Because I want to play high def content plus there's a certain big performance needed to quality encodings and Linux nvidia driver lacks Pure Video for playback and also I don't plan to add dedicated encoder. We live in the digital age, don't we? :-) Other thing to care about is that I should try to go for an energy saving, low-heat CPU because the machine will be mostly switched on 7/24 - all day and night. So if you look at official recommendations, you will find that 1080p/i (1920x1080 resolution) content really needs a powerful processor. Around 5200+ in terms of AMD. Yet I've decided to go with an AMD 64 X2 4200+ Energy Efficient. Reasons: it eats around 65W officially has two cores, a silent machine may need less heat to burn, I only want to play mostly 720p contents and as a matter of fact I've always been an AMD buyer a fact that is strengthen by the fact that the given motherboard only supports AMD CPUs. ;-) And yes, it's rather cheap (16 thousand HUF ~ $94 at this time). Also I am expecting to have an nvidia driver with Pure Video support for h264 and mpeg4 someday which will fasten things and lighten the burden of the CPU...well hope dies last. So to sum up things I've bought an 4200+ dual core... It's operational temperature is around 20-60 Celsius degrees with a maximum recommended core temperature of 65 degrees.
25 November 2007
Central Processing Unit
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Nice to see that you have a dual-core CPU in there, I hope you'll manage H.264 at 1920x1080 with that. With my 2.8 GHz P4, I always have to re-encode to XviD, but then it works surprisingly well. I'm not sure if any of our boxes could handle DRM-crippled Blu-Ray discs.
It's too bad you had to resort to more fans later on anyhow. I wonder how the PS3 does it. I haven't heard how much noise one makes, but the rumor mill says it's pretty quiet while playing Blu-Ray, so it should be able to do XviD or H.264 fine at the same noise level. Would a PS3 be an option for you or do you like the flexibility you get from a x86 CPU?
Oh, and isn't it bizarre that our PCs have to waste electricity simply because of Hollywood's digital restrictions? :)
Well, that one fan that I had to add is luckily does really little noise because its a case fan with 950RPM which is half/third noise level of a CPU cooler. So it's working really well!
Actually I own a semi-HD television so I don't go for 1920x1080 content I'm happy with 720p things.
PS3 is a nice thing but it's linux support is lacking much, and I also want TV recording with MythTV.
The bigger problem I see is the lack of pureVideo for linux drivers of nvidia.
Cheers,
Paul
oh, just to correct myself, PS3 has a nice linux distro but I've heard that it lacks in 3d.
Yes, 3D isn't really possible right now, though they have found access to its 3D hardware, which was thought impossible before. So perhaps we'll see some unofficial 3D developments.
And the recording issue is correct too.
Since you're not going for 1080i, I guess your machine should be perfect :)
Post a Comment