[Danux]

Hi there, new to the forum & XBMC/Kodi, thought I'd leave a record for anyone searching the forum for a machine with similar specs.

I'm migrating from a Popcorn Hour A-110 NMT, which has been NFSed into a fileserver holding my media. The "new" HTPC is SlaXBMC, v14.1 in 64-bits + nVidia blob (including vdpau), upgraded to XBMCv13.2 "Gotham", being fed media from a webserver off the fileserver.

Hardware is a 1st-gen Atom 330 soldered into a Jetway NC92-330-LF motherboard, one 2G stick of DDR2 400, 500G PATA drive + PATA DVD-ROM, Zotac GT-520 on a PCI (not PCI-E) slot, audio is Realtek ALC662 6ch on-board, but audio and video are fed through HDMI to the television. Audio is then fed from the TV to external 2.0 micro hi-fi.
Atom 330
http://ark.intel.com/products/35641/Inte...33-MHz-FSB

Jetway NC92-330-LF
http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboard_vie...C92-330-LF

Zotac GT-520
http://www.zotac.com/ca/products/graphic...0-pci.html

All of my video has been encoded to be played by a PCH A-110, so h.264 profile high 4.0 with a max bitrate of 25mbps, resolutions in multiples of 16. Audio is primarily 448kbp 48KHz AC3 5.1.
Playing back HD video + 5.1 AC3 audio content, served via webserver, I see my CPU usage occasionally spiking to 30%, but average about 25% +/-2% (of potentially 400% - 4 cores at 100% each).
Playback of the same content from a flash drive in a USB-2.0 port is also smooth.


That's it. Based on what I am seeing, this is still quite a bit more CPU than is necessary. Perhaps if I can find a P3/P2 at a garage sale, I'll take a shot at running something even more meager.
Great piece of software BTW, I really like what I see, so far.

[Dougie Fresh]

Nice. It's fun to see what you can do with the minimum. You basically made an ION2 PC. ION is still great for HTPC, especially in the newer forms like ION3 (D25x0 + GT610) and ION4 (C1037U + GT610) (though not sure anyone actually calls them ION now other than Chinese trade sites since ION was an Nvidia brand name and discontined thanks to Intel).

This probably my favorite ION2 motherboard: http://www.macmall.com/p/Giada-Motherboa...dp.iadcjbd (Atom D2500 + Nvidia GT610)

FWIW, the Atom 330 is not 4C but 2C+2T (via Hyperthreading)

[Danux]

Had a bit of time to experiment with some of my lesser hardware today, gathered a bit of interesting information.
Today's experiments were done with SlaXBMC using the 32-bit installation. Any successful installations used the same media feed as the OP.

I had excellent success with an ECS 741GX-M motherboard running an Athlon XP2100+. I tried a couple of hardware variations on this board.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/AMD-Ath...DMT3C.html
http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/mother...-M%2BV1.0/

My first run was with the OP-mentioned Zotac GT-520 PCI card & 512M PC266 DDR1. It would not start X at first, yielding the error
"The NVIDIA kernel module does not appear to be receiving interrupts generated by the NVIDIA graphics device PCI:"...
I had to pass a kernel parameter "pci=nomsi" on booting, to get things playing nicely. Once up, the XBMC interface was smooth, and I set the system up to pass the audio to the GF119 HDMI audio on the card; playback of 1080p AC3-5.1 content was also perfect. CPU usage averaged about 20%, with occasional spikes to 30%, during playback.

Next up, I swapped in another GT-520 video card, but this one is a PCI-E card which I dropped into a PCI-to-PCIE converter then plugged into the PCI slot. I've used this setup to fiddle around in Blender, in the past, so knew there was all kinds of compatibility with the nVidia blob; basically, it shows up as a PCI-E v1.0 device. Again, with 512M, this system functioned as well as the the first setup - no difference.

Last test with this system was to pull one stick of RAM, run it with 256M & the converted PCI-E card. The system stayed functional, although it employed the swap space often, and any initial movement with the mouse in the interface jerked/froze momentarily, before it recovered and worked fine. Video playback started poorly, as the system cached a bit of data - for a couple of seconds it looked like it wasn't going to happen, but once it has dumped some resident data into swap, the A/V feed turns smooth and plays well. I saw 160M pushed onto the swap space, so I'm guessing perfect playback takes about 512M of RAM. Really, though, the minor amount of stutter I noticed was negligible - once it's under way, it seems to stay composed. If 256M is all you've got, it'll do IMHO.

Also tested a dinosaur - a Compaq DeskPro 2000. Pentium 1 @133MHz with 128M of EDO RAM.
With a bit of finagling, I was able to get the software installed, and the system eventually booted into X using the on-board Cirrus video, but there is a prodigious use of swap space getting there. I could tell that it was trying to start XBMC, but I lacked the patience to let it get all the way there. The 16-bit VESA video driver isn't really up to the task, anyway, so I inserted several recent(ish) nVidia PCI cards (8400GS & the two GT-520), but the old system apparently lacks the juice to power these cards. Ultimately, I had to give up on it - without the new video card functioning, there is no point really.

I have no hardware between the P1-133 and the Athlon XP2100+, so likely won't be experimenting much more, but I am quite curious to see just how low I can go with a PCI-to-PCI-E converter. Perhaps a PCI-E card powered by an aux 12V line might show up on that Compaq...