# Hardware for a new mediacenter.

## m_abs

My current mediacenter uses to much power and I want to build a new one.

I've found this motherboard and CPU, that I'm thinking of buying.

MSI K9A2GM-FIH and an Sempron LE-1250.

The MSI K9A2GM-FIH has Radeon HD 3200 video chipset which should have UVD2.

Can I under Gentoo use this motherboard + cpu to play 1080p h264 encoded video files?

Or can you suggest a better hardware combination? Maybe something with optical audio output.

The mediacenter will be doubling as a file server, which will be running 24/7.

MSI K9A2GM-FIH http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=&cat3_no=&prod_no=1436

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## duckz

 *Quote:*   

> Can I under Gentoo use this motherboard + cpu to play 1080p h264 encoded video files?
> 
> Or can you suggest a better hardware combination? Maybe something with optical audio output. 

 

yes, I build my multimedia box based on old pentium 4 3.00 ghz and it plays h264 encoding video downloaded from internet without glitch.

 *Quote:*   

> The mediacenter will be doubling as a file server, which will be running 24/7. 

 

If you don't really have too many user connecting at once (like 5+ user) then it should be fine.

suggestion:

Get the fastest harddisk you can find for the operating system

Use 3 harddisk, one for os, one for multimedia data and the cheapest one for torrent (I have some harddisk died torrenting)

Get yourself the best cpu cooler you can buy (don't have to be the most expensive one)

Never use the OEM power supply, upgrade to a better one (don't have to be the most expensive one).

Use a GOOD casing, bad casing will make lots of noise

as for sound, if you don't have home theater. just use the onboard sound with cheap sound cable jack.

Memory card -- get at least 1 gb for playing and 2 gb for tv ripping or dvd ripping, it helps alot since your box will be serving files as well. personally I used 512 mb but I dont think you can buy 512 mb new mem card today.

Think about the remote as well, personally I used my laptop as remote and cheap ps 2 cable extender for my keyboard as local remote. but you can use bluetooth, joystick, ir for remote.

Finally, think about the noise, if you put the pc in your bed room consider get yourself a fanless cooling system (trust me after hearing the noise for quite a while you'll have problem sleeping).

hope this helps

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## Nerevar

Be sure to check out the 4850e/5050e. They have the same 45W TDP as the sempron and they are dual core instead of single.

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## m_abs

Thanks for your replies.

@duckz

 *Quote:*   

> yes, I build my multimedia box based on old pentium 4 3.00 ghz and it plays h264 encoding video downloaded from internet without glitch.

 

I think that would defeat the purpose of replacing the "old" hardware. The P4 series uses alot of electricity.  :Smile: 

Also my current processor is a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83 Mobile on desktop CPU and it has problems with these files.

I'm replacing it for two reasons:

1. The current machine uses around 100W on idle, even though the CPU has scaled down to 1GB.

It shouldn't be the CPUs fault, since it actually has a lower TDP then the Sempron I was looking at. 

I'll replace the big 550W NorthQ PSU with a smaller Antec EarthWatt 380W PSU. And see if that helps with the power usage.

2. Sometime h264 poses a problem for the current system, especially with 1080p. It isn't always, but it seems that just a little load other then the playback triggers this problem.

This is/was the reason I'm looking at something with a hardware decoder. Also this will take some of the load of the CPU, so it hopefully can run scaled down and conserve power.

Before I spend money on the new CPU and motherboard, I've decided to see the power usage with the new PSU.

I've found another motherboard I will use "ASUS M3A78-EM". It has more USB-ports, more SATA-ports and it has optical audio output.

 *Quote:*   

> If you don't really have too many user connecting at once (like 5+ user) then it should be fine.

 

I'm the only user. The comment about the file server was mostly to give a reason why power usage is so important.  :Smile: 

I've a Thermaltake DH-101 cabinet with remote control, although I've havn't gotten around to getting the remote to work yet.

@Nerevar

 *Quote:*   

> Be sure to check out the 4850e/5050e. They have the same 45W TDP as the sempron and they are dual core instead of single.

 

I'm not sure that dual core make much sense for a system there only one heavy process (video/audio decoding) will be running at one time.

Unless the software has been written to utilize more then one core and I don't think mplayer or vlc is capable of using multiple cores. 

Or am I missing something?

So I'm not sure that paying nearly twice the price of the dual core would the worth it,

I've however decided that I'll drop the Sempron for the cheapest Athlon64 I can find (LE-1640), which is at about 65% of the price of 4850e here in Denmark.

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## Nerevar

I guess it depends on what you're wanting to do. Simple playback of certain 1080p formats may be possible with a sempron, but I know that x264 .mkv videos at 1080p take quite a bit of horsepower. I'd be very surprised if a sempron or similar could handle that type of video. Whatever you decide, please post your results when you get it running.

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## m_abs

 *Nerevar wrote:*   

> I guess it depends on what you're wanting to do. Simple playback of certain 1080p formats may be possible with a sempron, but I know that x264 .mkv videos at 1080p take quite a bit of horsepower. I'd be very surprised if a sempron or similar could handle that type of video. Whatever you decide, please post your results when you get it running.

 

A sempron wouldn't be able to play it alone. But the onboard graphciscard in the motherboard has hardware decoder which suppot both mpeg2 and h264 is and the it should be supported by the proprietary ati-driver.

I'll post the result  :Smile: 

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## Tariella

I own a htpc with onboard radeon hd3200 chipset and I'm waiting for months for a hardware accelerated video driver (proprietary). There is no driver support for this yet. Not even in the proprietary fglrx driver.

The only hardware with accelerated HD video playback is for nvidia right now. 

While ati was promising to add support for months, nvidia just came out with a driver that has video accelerating capabilities.

As of now their VDPAU is being implemented in every software-player I know of.

If the ati driver ever supports HD movie playback it will be necessary for the player software to add support for this first before it can be of any use to us endusers.

So, I'd buy a cheap VDPAU supporting nvidia card. 

Don't go for ati, they may not support video acceleration for a long time.

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## h0mer`-

```
processor   : 0

vendor_id   : GenuineIntel

cpu family   : 6

model      : 15

model name   : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E4500  @ 2.20GHz

stepping   : 13

cpu MHz      : 1200.000

cache size   : 2048 KB
```

this is my cpu - and i've had problems playing 1080i mkv files on my mediaceneter pc too. until i used the cache option in mplayer.

while playing content the cpu usage is usually between 90-100% for one of the cores. the other one is around 50-60%.

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## Tariella

Mplayer has no multicore capability.

There is a spin off that is working mit multiple cores (no ebuild existing): http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayerxp/

Xbmc Media center is another software that can use more than one cpu.

And xing and vlc also, but they don't support bluray's m2ts container yet afaik.

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> So, I'd buy a cheap VDPAU supporting nvidia card. 

 

This is a very good option. Spend $40 on a 8400GS 512MB (get the one with the 567MHz core clock) and then all the decoding is done in the video card. I am amazed at the drop in cpu usage on my Q9550. Instead of using 30+% cpu it now uses 3 to 15% and that at the lowest cpu speedstep instead of at the highest.

BTW the vdpau enabled mplayer is in the berkano overlay.

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> Be sure to check out the 4850e/5050e. They have the same 45W TDP as the sempron and they are dual core instead of single.

 

I would not bother with these. I mean these are just factory underclocked cpus. You can achieve the same by just running your higher clocked cpu at a lower frequency and voltage. And also at idle (1GHz these are not that much different in terms of power draw from any other X2 at idle around 20W)

Also if you want to play with undervolting see:

http://www.linux-phc.org/index.php?sid=ba0356aade078116cf7d4c04a0bc53e5

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## m_abs

 *Tariella wrote:*   

> I own a htpc with onboard radeon hd3200 chipset and I'm waiting for months for a hardware accelerated video driver (proprietary). There is no driver support for this yet. Not even in the proprietary fglrx driver

 

Thanks, you just stopped me from making a stupid mistake  :Smile: 

I thought I had checked that the UVD was usable, but I can see now that I hadn't done it good enough.

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## duckz

 *Quote:*   

> I've found another motherboard I will use "ASUS M3A78-EM". It has more USB-ports, more SATA-ports and it has optical audio output. 

 

Have you considered more ports and sata (when connected) is equal to more power needed from PSU?.

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> I'm not sure that dual core make much sense for a system there only one heavy process (video/audio decoding) will be running at one time.
> 
> Unless the software has been written to utilize more then one core and I don't think mplayer or vlc is capable of using multiple cores.
> ...

 

IMHO when one of the core is utilized for the Multimedia playback then the other core can tackle the other process that may need processing, like operating system related? or I am wrong about this?.

In my opinion, if you are looking for playing very high resolution media files, get the best cpu you can get.

but in reality, If you like to get your media files from torrent, its very rare you'll find a very high resolution media files. but that is just my opinion

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## m_abs

I've decided too buy a new video-card for my existing media center and I've replaced the PSU with a more effective one (Antec Earthwatt 380W) which made a high drop in power consumption around 30W.

Of cause the new video-card will use more power then the existing system, but I hope that it won't use too much power on idle.

The card is a Cube3D 8400GS 512MB, I know it isn't the 567MHz edition but it was the cheapest card I could find with that chipset and DVI  :Smile: .

 *Quote:*   

> IMHO when one of the core is utilized for the Multimedia playback then the other core can tackle the other process that may need processing, like operating system related? or I am wrong about this?. 

 

As I see it the core that decodes the video has to be fast enough for decoding the video and since the two cores in a dual CPU only have 50% processing power each that means that the dual core CPU have to be more expensive then a single core CPU that is fast enough for both decoding the video and running the other processes.

But as I said, I've bought a video-card instead of replacing the motherboard and CPU so I'll leave that kind of consideration till the next time I need to build a media center.

Well thanks for your replies, I'll get back with my experiences with this.

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## m_abs

Time for my experiences, just in case anyone care  :Smile: 

I bought a "Cube3D 8400GS 512MB" which has a hardware decoder for h264, mpeg-2 and VC1.

I've played mkv-files with x264 at 1080p without to much trouble, it goes out of sync if the hard drive is under heavy load from something else. Mplayer still uses a lot of CPU time around 50% but not enough for the CPU to speed up.

There is an annoying problem I've run into, mplayer tries to use vdpau on xvid, I assume that's because it's a mpeg-4 codec, but it doesn't work at all. Mplayer opens a windows in the size of the video but not content in it. The only way I've found to get mplayer to not do this, is to use -vo sdl which screws up aspect ratio in fullscreen. For the moment I use VLC for these files.

I had a bit of concern about power usage with this card, but on idle with the screen blanked out/suspended power usage is at most 10W higher.

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## drescherjm

 *Quote:*   

> I had a bit of concern about power usage with this card, but on idle with the screen blanked out/suspended power usage is at most 10W higher.

 

For me the power went down slightly after adding the 8400GS versus a 5200 low end card.

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## yther

@m_abs:  You might want to look at rebuilding all of your video-related stuff, including mplayer, with the newer nVidia drivers installed.  I am using the recent 180.37 proprietary drivers with a GeForce 9500 GT (an EVGA brand card, cost about $65) and the performance is amazing.  I've tested on Xvid-encoded AVI files and they play just fine using VDPAU driver; also MPG, MKV using h264, and some other formats I can't recall right now.

It seems to be very important that everything involved is compiled and linked properly; on Ubuntu I was also using a VDPAU-enabled mplayer, but it only worked for the MKV files; anything not encoded with x264 would crash unless I told mplayer to use a different video output.

Now I play a 720p video in full screen and CPU usage is about 2%!   :Shocked:   Previously on the 177.x drivers it would be around 30% CPU, and higher resolution stuff would be worse.

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## duckz

 *Quote:*   

> it goes out of sync if the hard drive is under heavy load from something else.

 

maybe try to put lower nice value for other processes can help reduce this problem or create a tmp filesystem in your memory that can be used to hard disk heavy load program such as emerge.

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## DaggyStyle

if you didn't bought the computer yet, why not give a wanted amount to spend and will try to help you with the parts?

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