i3 or LLano (a6-3500) or G530
#1
Follow on from a previous post, just wanting some advice really.

Want something thats cheap to run and also must be able to do video re-encoding and be able to handle freeview HD playback and recording.

Especially interested in the i3 as it looks perfect although have seen reports that it might have problems with 1080p?


http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=110322
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#2
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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#3
voip-ninja Wrote: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.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with the A4-3400. It is new tech and maybe I should wait a bit before jumping into it head first. I just like the idea of lower wattage and the idea of the GPU built into the APU/MB combo. Could it have been your MB though? What was your complete setup?
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#4
voip-ninja Wrote: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.

Very interested to see your review of an i3/GT520 set up voip-ninja - I was looking to go down the A4 path as well until i saw your review. Some of the issues you encountered were deal breakers for me as well. I can imagine if you had these problems in Windows then in a linux environment ie Openelec it would be even worse.

Anyway looking for to a review of the i3 setup and if you get sometime can you try Openelec on it as well?
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#5
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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#6
voip-ninja Wrote:I am not familiar with Openelec. If it's extremely simple then I might try it.

** sorry if you know that already **

think of OpenELEC like a XBMC 'only' Linux Distro....
meaning, its not like XBMC Live where you can quit XBMC and
access a Linux Desktop where you can then launch your favorite Web Browser
of what ever else linux is capable of doing,,,
OpenELEC is XBMC and thats it!
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#7
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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#8
I just ordered a G620 and a new MB yesterday. I've been following the happenings WRT the llano chips and I've been a little disappointed as well. I want a low power machine so that means I'll need to use the iGPU. I'm getting the G620 at Microcenter for $60. The i3 would have been $100 and that's a decent deal but I'm not going to be doing transcoding on my HTPC so I decided to save myself $40. Plus the G620 does use less power than an i3.

As far a I know there are two primary gripes with the Intel HD 2000/3000 graphics:
  1. Macro-blocking:@imnotreallyhere - I believe this is the tearing issue you're referring to. If you're running a standard Dharma build of XBMC you will see macro-blocking if you enable hw acceleration. Basically the movie is unwatchable. This has been solved but it's only in the nightly builds now so you'll need to run one of them to fix the problem.
  2. 23.976 fps support: The SB chips cannot playback content at 23.976 fps. Instead it is 24.000 fps which supposedly means you'll get a dropped frame every 40 seconds or so. Many users complain about this but there are a TON more who say they cannot see it at all. So I'm hoping that I'm one of those who cannot see it.

Right now I have an e350 in my HTPC and it plays everything I can throw at it just fine. The biggest downside is that I find it to be a little sluggish in XBMC Confluence and A LOT sluggish when I'm using WMC for recorded TV. So I need a chip with a little more ass when it comes to compute power. That's where the G620 comes in. The worst case scenario for me is if the Intel graphics suck. Then I have two options -
  1. Use a spare Nvidia G210 I have lying around
  2. Go back to the e350 and put the G620 & MB into my unraid server
HTPC: Win 7 Home 64-bit | MB | CPU | GPU | RAM | Case | PSU | Tuner | HDDs: OS, Media | DVD Burner | Remote
Media server: unraid 4.7 | CPU | MB | RAM | Case | PSU | HDDs: Parity-2TB, Data-2x2TB
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#9
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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#10
imnotreallyhere Wrote: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

I recently bought my 3rd XBMC HTPC and went with i3 as I wanted enough power to transcode HD material on the go to my android tablet via Plex(device couldn't handle most of my high profile mkv's and I wasn't going to double my storage and re-encode my entire library.) I've had nothing but trouble with the build. Some people say the latest nightly build fixes alot of issues with the tearing and jittering but it only crashes to desktop(running windows build for the transcoding program) when I run any HD material. I finally threw my hands up and went and bought a g430(was on sale with rebate for 20 bucks) and tossed it in. Everything works wonderfully now. I doubt that I will every try another intel build for xbmc ever again. Was nothing but headaches.


I found a build before I got the g430 that worked 99% the way my atom/ion's build worked and was happy with it. Then I upgraded to a nightly build and couldn't find/remember the older build I had. Not sure why the new build was crashing to desktop everytime I played a HD movie with dxva enabled but I was done messing with it. Just threw in an nvidia card and called it a day.
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#11
Riffmaker Wrote:I found a build before I got the g430 that worked 99% the way my atom/ion's build worked and was happy with it. Then I upgraded to a nightly build and couldn't find/remember the older build I had. Not sure why the new build was crashing to desktop everytime I played a HD movie with dxva enabled but I was done messing with it. Just threw in an nvidia card and called it a day.
A friend of mine got an i3 about a month ago and had the exact same issue you did. For whatever reason there is a specific nightly build that must be used in order for dxva to work with intel HD graphics. The latest nightly builds just crash the system when running HD video.
HTPC: Win 7 Home 64-bit | MB | CPU | GPU | RAM | Case | PSU | Tuner | HDDs: OS, Media | DVD Burner | Remote
Media server: unraid 4.7 | CPU | MB | RAM | Case | PSU | HDDs: Parity-2TB, Data-2x2TB
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#12
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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#13
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.
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#14
imnotreallyhere Wrote: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

no problems tearing on my I3 rigs. you need to turn off HW assisted decode and decode only in SW but so far after building and deploying 3 I3 rigs for friends no real complaints. certainly not on tearing with DVD or BD content.

dunno about other types of content. not dropping frames either. plays avatar perfectly.
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#15
Headcase_Fargon Wrote: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.

How many frames do you see dropping if you press 'o' during playback and look at codecinfo?

I just put an i3 + GT 520 together and I see what looks like the occasional frame drop, but my frame drop count is fixed at only 26, so I might be seeing something else. I set the desktop to 1080p/23 as that apparently sets the frame rate output to 1080p/23.976, or at least that's what I think is happening.

The i3 should have more than enough power for 1080P video, with or without video hardware acceleration. I did notice that the A4-3400 I was playing with earlier did not have any problems with smooth playback of 1080p/24 source blu-ray MKVs... but it does have an ATI feature called "motion smoother" that I think is helping here, it might be smoothing out the 1080p/24 output.

//correction

I see that in the few minutes I was typing this post, that the frame drop count jumped from 26 to 30, so I suspect I am seeing the 1 frame drop every 40 or so seconds, which would be consistent more or less with the 1080p/24 output problem, so maybe with my display set to 1080p/23 it is not truly locked up right to 23.976 output. However, it's worth pointing out that I am streaming Avatar over gigabit wired ethernet and the bitrate can peak out over 35 mbps and I don't think the frame drops are happening because of the bit rate.
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i3 or LLano (a6-3500) or G5300