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Well, just to tell you about my own experience, I just built an A4-3500 based on some of the advice here, and I'm not particularly impressed right now.
Most of my beef centers around really poor driver control in the ATI Catalyst Control panel, as well as some luminance issues in which SD material is not displayed with the proper RGB range that it should be.
All of these things take a lot of time and patience to deal with, something I don't have. Probably if I had better qualified my needs (high quality playback through an AVR of Blu-ray sourced MKV content as well as a good chunk of SD-DVD material) I might have been steered in a different direction.
Final point, I had read that with the A4-3400 that even demanding skins like Aeon Nox were "snappy" but that was not my experience. It seemed to lag a little bit with a large movie wall and a lot of titles. I don't know if the i3 will be any better here, but I expect it probably will be.
I just ordered a GT520 and motherboard and a local retailer near me sells the i3-2200 for $99, so I am going to give that a shot before packing it all in for good. Sadly I am going to have to eat the restocking fees on the A4 and A75M-ITX motherboard, plus return shipping, so I am going to be out about $50 over this.
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A4 is really quite good for what it costs. I understand nvidia has their own issues. By trying both I will at least be able to do a direct comparison. I am not familiar with Openelec. If it's extremely simple then I might try it.
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Does anyone have a HTPC with an i3 in it?
Heard bad things about tearing on some videos but wanted to get some frirst hand experience ?
Thanks
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Openelec is really easy to install - its only about 100 megs to download and just boot from a USB stick and done.
You should find better performance (hopefully) with the Nvidia anyway
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Or turn DXVA off altogether.....DXVA is highly overrated these days with the high power/low wattage cpu's currently on the market.
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I'm running an I3 build under Windows 7 and for what it's worth I get pretty bad frame dropping with high bitrate 1080p files. Hardware acceleration doesn't work at all. I posted asking about it in the support forum but everything I'm reading leads me to believe XBMC simply doesn't work well with software decoding.
Meanwhile my AMD E350 build plays everything great. The menu navigation is a bit slow though.