Worth upgrading any of my 4 year old HTPC setup?

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Asmodeus

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#106538 26-Jul-2012 01:17

Just wondering if anyone thinks I'll get a better experience if I were to upgrade any of the main components of my htpc? Im not really having any issues except a bit of pixelation on some Freeview HD channels and sometimes when I skip through ads on recorded TV it takes a little while for it to "gather itself" and start playing normally again on some Freeview channels. This has got worse as time has progressed. Video playback incl BR rips seems fine.

I watch Freeview HD, Sky and SD / HD videos on my HTPC. No major gaming at all. Win7MC x64

The stuff that would make a possible difference if upgraded is:

Asus P5Q-L main board
Intel Dual core E8400 3.0GHz CPU
Blackgold BTG3540 TV Tuner
Hauppauge PVR-150 MCE Edition
Asus EN9600GT-Silent Passive GPU
4GB Supertalent DDR2 800 RAM

Possibly graphics card would be first thing to upgrade but not sure if thats even necessary...

What are your thoughts?

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#662147 26-Jul-2012 06:44

Yip upgrade graphics. GPU video processing has come a long way since the 9 series video cards. Only issue is there are very few passive Nvidia cards these days for the rest I think we are OK.

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Asmodeus

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#662155 26-Jul-2012 07:16

Nety: Yip upgrade graphics. GPU video processing has come a long way since the 9 series video cards. Only issue is there are very few passive Nvidia cards these days for the rest I think we are OK.

Thanks. Looks like a few passive Nvidia cards on Pricespy still. Way more passive Radeons though, I thought they were fine to go with these days? Or are there still interlacing issues?

Disrespective

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#662172 26-Jul-2012 08:40

I tried to upgrade my HTPC to an ATI card from an old 8800 and had no end of troubles with driver conflicts and black screens. Moved back to a newer NVIDIA card and haven't had any more problems. I did install all the right drivers and removed all the old ones the driver manager said would conflict, just not the entire OS and main software.

I'm sure if I had reinstalled everything from scratch an ATI card would have probably been fine but I didn't feel like doing that at all.

nickrout

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#662184 26-Jul-2012 08:56

The only thing you should upgrade is your operating system. Go mythbuntu :)

sbiddle

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#662186 26-Jul-2012 09:07

The last 2 ATI upgrades (ie the last couple of months) seem to have finally sorted the H.264 issues, despite no mention in the release notes.

I use an Asus E35 M1 Pro board with onboard ATI GFX and it now works fine.

Nety

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#662217 26-Jul-2012 10:16

Personally I would still go Nvidia unless you have a real problem with them. Hopefully ATI have finally sorted their issues out but quite frankly they have had issues for years with our Freeview why take the risk? Nvidia just works. No if buts or maybes. If you do go passive I would make sure it is a good passive card however as I have a XFX passive a couple of years ago that used to get really really hot. Never failed but I never felt comfortable with how hot it used to get.

davidcole

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#662218 26-Jul-2012 10:22

Unless you need some increased performance to transcoding or something that, I'm not seeing a need to upgrade.

I only upgraded a 2gb AMD Dual Core 3600 machine recently cos the motherboard failed (actually turned out it was just the HDD becoming flaky). So I took that opportunity to upgrade the CPU - but I do some transcoding and conversion.

And as @sbiddle says ATI has come a long way, and I'm finding it pretty good after coming from an Nvidia 8600GT.

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kiwijunglist

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#662686 26-Jul-2012 23:05

Don't upgrade, leave as is.

HTPC / Home automation (home assistant) enthusiast.

davidcole

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#662721 27-Jul-2012 06:54

But possibly do a rebuild on w7.

New gpu drivers and tuner drivers on a clean system can do wonders.

mcraenz

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#662733 27-Jul-2012 08:19

As for the seek speed, consider doing a nightly defrag on you recording disk. Id say GPU might worth looking at. I'm going to move my HTPC out of the lounge and run a long HDMI cable. That way I can have a full tower and not worry about noise. Because it seems impossible to find a card which is lowprofile, silent (no fan) and has tuns of video processing power. This is especially important for the 1080i content from freeview HD and sky.

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geekiegeek

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#662739 27-Jul-2012 08:44

mcraenz: As for the seek speed, consider doing a nightly defrag on you recording disk. Id say GPU might worth looking at. I'm going to move my HTPC out of the lounge and run a long HDMI cable. That way I can have a full tower and not worry about noise. Because it seems impossible to find a card which is lowprofile, silent (no fan) and has tuns of video processing power. This is especially important for the 1080i content from freeview HD and sky.

Why have a video card at all, just go Intel ivy-bridge. Handles 1080i freeview fine.

My latest build is an ivy-bridge i5 (an i3 would also do) with stock cooler and an HVR 2200 capture card. That's it. just the CPU fan (on silent mode) and the power supply fan - whole thing is near silent. For quick channel change I use an SSD for OS and time-shift with a HDD for recording - everything else sits on a server under the house.

davidcole

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#662740 27-Jul-2012 08:46

geekiegeek:
mcraenz: As for the seek speed, consider doing a nightly defrag on you recording disk. Id say GPU might worth looking at. I'm going to move my HTPC out of the lounge and run a long HDMI cable. That way I can have a full tower and not worry about noise. Because it seems impossible to find a card which is lowprofile, silent (no fan) and has tuns of video processing power. This is especially important for the 1080i content from freeview HD and sky.

Why have a video card at all, just go Intel ivy-bridge. Handles 1080i freeview fine.

My latest build is an ivy-bridge i5 (an i3 would also do) with stock cooler and an HVR 2200 capture card. That's it. just the CPU fan (on silent mode) and the power supply fan - whole thing is near silent. For quick channel change I use an SSD for OS and time-shift with a HDD for recording - everything else sits on a server under the house.

Same with the AMD A8 (and I'm assuming the A6 and A4 as well since the video GPU is the same) - but I understand your hesitancy regarding AMD, but I have no issues at all, and no GPU fan.

blur

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#662803 27-Jul-2012 10:18

My 2 cents worth would be the following:

Upgreade the GPU - Agree that NVidia just works so this seems to be the logical option here.

The other upgreade you might consider is installing a SSD as the OS drive. I run MediaPortal and have a 120GB SSD drive as the OS drive. It also houses my MediaPortal install and the database and TV cache. It makes for fast channel changes, improves seek times, and re-boots are awesomely fast.

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browned

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Ultimate Geek

#662844 27-Jul-2012 11:13

Recently moved to a AMD A6-3500 with 8GB, SSD and 2.5" laptop drive for recording. Apart from a single scaling issue during one video driver upgrade, it runs fine and only draws about 80watts in recording and playing TV. It is silent as well. WAF factor very very good.

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Asmodeus

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#663090 27-Jul-2012 20:12

Thanks guys I already have the OS on an SSD but will do a defrag on the recording drive and see if that helps. I'm not having any playback issues so may hold off on gpu upgrade for now... This setup should at least see me out for another year or two I'm hoping. will upgrade gpu next though when I feel motivated to do so

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