[DaveHope]

Hi all,

I'm currently running XBMC on a home-grown mini-itx system; hardware spec as follows:

• Via CX700M (Via C7-D Processor @ 1500Mhz);
  
• 1 GiB DDR;
  
• 500GiB WDC WD5000BEVT 2.5" SATA disk;
  
• PCI GeForce 6200 (256M)
  

The system is completely fan-less; which is why I chose those components. Nothing worse than fan noise whilst listening to music

The system boots and mingetty auto-logs in my 'xbmc' user. 'startx' is in its bashrc which then fires off xbmc from .XDefaults. So it's a very minimalistic boot with no window manager to eat up my valuable cpu cycles

I can happily play back my music collection (FLAC) and movies with little, if any frame drop. Obviously with this setup HD content is out of the question (The 'Killa' sample plays at what seems like 1fps). During music playback the CPU sits at about 55% usage, however it's pretty much maxed during video playback. Memory usage is next to nothing (about 200MiB).

I'm not too fussed about HD content as I'll just play them on BluRay, but I get very poor menu performance with most skins. Rapier is probably the fastest, but still almost unusable once fan art is used.

Since the motherboard only has PCI slots, a decent graphics card isn't a possible upgrade. However I'd be interested if anyone has suggested upgrades? I'm contemplating getting the Zotac ION-ITX-C Fanless 1.6GHz Atom N230 Mini-ITX Board. The system has CUDA which from what I understand should make HD playback possible, offloading cpu usage to the graphics card? However the clock speed of the cpu is not much better than what I have currently.

I'm quite surprised that even when nothing is playing XBMC eats up 25-30% of my CPU, then 50-60% when a FLAC file is being played. Any ideas as to why this might be?

Any thoughts? Or suggested performance tweaks to make menu navigation faster?

[althekiller]

I'm quite surprised that even when nothing is playing XBMC eats up 25-30% of my CPU, then 50-60% when a FLAC file is being played. Any ideas as to why this might be?

Just like all of the other "OMG TOO HIGH CPU USAGE!!!" threads state... We use a game loop for rendering, so the whole GUI and all visibility conditionals are evaluated every frame. This costs CPU. Patches welcome for an event based renderer.

[DaveHope]

Just like all of the other "OMG TOO HIGH CPU USAGE!!!" threads state... We use a game loop for rendering, so the whole GUI and all visibility conditionals are evaluated every frame. This costs CPU. Patches welcome for an event based renderer.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, I'd not realized that. It doesn't however answer my questions about the CPU usage for audio playback. XBMC seems to be using (on my system) almost twice as much cpu time when playing back a FLAC file compared to a similar MP3. My understanding is that FLAC should have around the same level of computational load as MP3?

[neeraj_sharma9]

Hi DaveHope,

I bought a Jetway J7F5M (CX700M chipset) motherboard which I want to use for my XBMC HTPC. I have tried installing XBMC live on it but the XBMC UI is white. I searched on the net and now worried if this motherboard is even a right choice for XBMC. Since you are on same chipset, have you tested the mobo with the onboard graphics? Is Unichrome Pro II sufficient for running XBMC? I don't need HD.

What should I use for OS Windows or Linux? any specific settings/KB for this mobo?

thanks,
Neeraj