Opinions requested on HTPC specs

[Twinkle]

I'm putting together an HTPC to run Sage, and I'm currently considering the following for the baseline specs:


Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 GHz CPU
2 GB RAM
nVidia 9600 GT 512 MB
Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer

Two Hauppauge HD-PVRs controlling two H21 receivers
USB-UIRT



Will I run into any problems with this setup? Will it be able to handle simultaneously recording 2 HD feeds while playing a third? Will it be able to handle playing Blu-Ray while recording 2 HD feeds?

Is there anything that should be changed or beefed up?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by Twinkle

Will I run into any problems with this setup?

Definitely. This is an HTPC after all.

Will it be able to handle simultaneously recording 2 HD feeds while playing a third? Will it be able to handle playing Blu-Ray while recording 2 HD feeds?

I don't see any problems. Recording with the HD PVR has very low overhead.

Is there anything that should be changed or beefed up?

Here are a few thoughts:

1. Make sure you get a solid, high efficiency power supply. Don't cheap out on this or you will regret it later.
2. Invest in a couple of separate hard drives for recording in addition to your system drive. Make sure you format your recording drives with 64k clusters.
3. Don't put any media or data in your OS partition. Give the OS about 20GB or so and make a separate partition out of the rest of the space. You can use this second partition for either recordings or for media library content. This will make life much easier if you ever have to reinstall the OS.
4. This isn't related to hardware, but it is a good idea to schedule regular backups of your entire SageTV directory to a different drive or computer once you have everything up and running. It could save your tail someday.

I'll let you know if I think of anything else.

Aloha,
Mike

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by Twinkle

I'm putting together an HTPC to run Sage, and I'm currently considering the following for the baseline specs:


Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 GHz CPU
2 GB RAM
nVidia 9600 GT 512 MB
Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer

Two Hauppauge HD-PVRs controlling two H21 receivers
USB-UIRT



Will I run into any problems with this setup? Will it be able to handle simultaneously recording 2 HD feeds while playing a third? Will it be able to handle playing Blu-Ray while recording 2 HD feeds?

Is there anything that should be changed or beefed up?

Why not go with a less powerful server and pick up an STX-HD100? Dropping the sound card and the video card alone should save you the 200 bucks to buy an STX-HD100. And you won't have any playback headaches....This is just a thought anyway.

[Twinkle]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

I'll let you know if I think of anything else.

Aloha,
Mike

Thank you, Mike. The other items I was prepared for - I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing any performance concerns. The System Requirements list a 3.0 GHz CPU for HD, and I wasn't sure how a Quad 2.66 compared. Especially when we consider the possibility of adding Blu-Ray to the mix.

[Twinkle]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Why not go with a less powerful server and pick up an STX-HD100? Dropping the sound card and the video card alone should save you the 200 bucks to buy an STX-HD100. And you won't have any playback headaches....This is just a thought anyway.

Due to the location of the cabling and other items, the PC basically has to go where the TV is, anyway. So getting the Extender seems a bit silly, under those circumstances. Plus, the extender is locked in to Sage, whereas a stronger PC can be used for anything.

I know that it's very handy for certain setups, but for me, it's not something that I really need.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by Twinkle

Due to the location of the cabling and other items, the PC basically has to go where the TV is, anyway. So getting the Extender seems a bit silly, under those circumstances. Plus, the extender is locked in to Sage, whereas a stronger PC can be used for anything.

I know that it's very handy for certain setups, but for me, it's not something that I really need.

That makes sense. One other thing to keep in mind if you are sitting the computer next to your tv is silent/almost silent cooling. The last thing you want is a bunch of loud fans....

[Twinkle]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

That makes sense. One other thing to keep in mind if you are sitting the computer next to your tv is silent/almost silent cooling. The last thing you want is a bunch of loud fans....

Very true. Accoustically, however, I'm not worried about the PC, but the UPS.

[autoboy]

Seems hugely overkill to me. Are you playing games? The 3ghz requirement is based on the older P4 and software decoding. modern graphics cards have full acceleration for BluRay so you can even use a AMD x2 4200 and a AMD 3450 video card and you will still be able to play back HD video. Recording takes almost 0 cpu.

[Twinkle]

Originally Posted by autoboy

Seems hugely overkill to me. Are you playing games? The 3ghz requirement is based on the older P4 and software decoding. modern graphics cards have full acceleration for BluRay so you can even use a AMD x2 4200 and a AMD 3450 video card and you will still be able to play back HD video. Recording takes almost 0 cpu.

Thank you for clarifying that it's based on the older P4 - that issue of using the same name for different generations is something that causes a lot of misinformation.

I think I might keep those specs though - if there's a good solution in the future for using HDMI without the HDCP issues, I might very well need to do software decoding.

[JetreL]

I personally run a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.4 GHz CPU and never see the processor average 10% and that is mostly overhead of the system. If you buy a decent Video Card and make sure that you have a dedicated hard drive for video only you should not have any problems running HD.

The good thing about running a beefy computer is you can play games while encoding and not see any lag!

[Ryokurin]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Why not go with a less powerful server and pick up an STX-HD100? Dropping the sound card and the video card alone should save you the 200 bucks to buy an STX-HD100. And you won't have any playback headaches....This is just a thought anyway.

I know personally, I have a bunch of matroska files with subtitles that frankly are a pain to play with the subs in SagePlayer (which is why I try to use directshow) The situation is improving slowly, but the fact that subs are unreliable keep me from going with the stx-hd100. Right now I'm planning on building something similar as a front end, and switching between Sage and probably Meedios when I want to play a subbed mkv file.

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by autoboy

Seems hugely overkill to me. Are you playing games? The 3ghz requirement is based on the older P4 and software decoding. modern graphics cards have full acceleration for BluRay so you can even use a AMD x2 4200 and a AMD 3450 video card and you will still be able to play back HD video. Recording takes almost 0 cpu.

I wonder how many surprised people will be rushing to upgrade their servers once they see how much processing power it takes to do commercial detection on H.264 files... Just a thought.

Aloha,
Mike

[othy]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

I wonder how many surprised people will be rushing to upgrade their servers once they see how much processing power it takes to do commercial detection on H.264 files... Just a thought.

Aloha,
Mike

+1

Last week I swapped a nice mb/CPU combo out of my server for a wimpy little thing due to some quirkines in WHS that I couldn't nail down. After Jere's early reports, I'm sweating!

Tim

[Twinkle]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

I wonder how many surprised people will be rushing to upgrade their servers once they see how much processing power it takes to do commercial detection on H.264 files... Just a thought.

Aloha,
Mike

Thanks for the info! Very helpful to have.

[autoboy]

Oh, good call. So, how much CPU does h.264 commercial skip take?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by autoboy

Oh, good call. So, how much CPU does h.264 commercial skip take?

According to Jere, 90% on all 4 cores of a Q6600 to process an H.264 file at 4x real time.
(Note he said that this is not yet optimized)

Aloha,
Mike

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

According to Jere, 90% on all 4 cores of a Q6600 to process an H.264 file at 4x real time.
(Note he said that this is not yet optimized)

Aloha,
Mike

Bet this could be great offloaded to the GPU like nVidia wants to do. Too bad even they haven't figured this out yet. Oh well, guess I better start saving for a new CPU/mb in addition to the HD-PVR.