[othertomperson]

Hi

In the hopefully-not-too-distant future I'm going to build a low powered, inexpensive HTPC and I was wondering is the £30 AMD A4-6300 APU up to the task of powering a HD DVR? I'll be honest, I haven't got a clue what kind of resources are necessary CPU/GPU-wise for this and would rather not go overboard on something that really only needs to stream online content, play blu-rays and stream games over LAN from a dedicated gaming PC elsewhere in the house.

[McButton]

you get what you put into it. I've had about 5 different setups. If you plan to do a lot with a $50 machine, expect it to have issues with something... often. If you put $200 in, expect less frustration and more functionally. If you are doing netflix, blu rays, and gaming... Expect some issues if you are going cheap.

Just a thought.

[othertomperson]

Well yeah, that's why I'm asking what people would recommend for something that has to encode/decode for Steam In-Home Streaming, and to function as a DVR for a dual TV Tuner PCI card. I'm not just out to build the cheapest thing you can call a HTPC, but at the same time I don't want to go overboard on something that is overkill.

[teeedubb]

A DVR (without transcoding) doesn't need much CPU -all its doing is writing the stream to disk. From what I've read steam IHS uses GPU decoding for streaming, so I'd make sure its compatible with the amd igpu.

[heyted]

For comparison, here is a dual core Atom D2550 1.86 GHz combined with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 610:

[othertomperson]

For comparison, here is a dual core Atom D2550 1.86 GHz combined with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 610:

I wouldn't have an issue with that level of performance, and the A4 should be better than the Atom here. So just IHS to look at. Thanks, guys