[1995Turbo]

I plan on upgrading my main rig later this year and would like to use the hand-me-downs to upgrade the home theater PC.

Option one is to take the Phenom 2 980 (4 core 3.7ghz) processor and mother board couple it with the GTS450 video card that is already in the PC.

Option two is to take the Llano (bulldozer core) APU from my wife's computer and give the wife the 980. The current processor in her machine is a Llano based APU, A8-3850, 2.9ghz built with bulldozer (turd-dozer) cores. The APU is currently cross-fired with A Readon 6670 video card.



Would the newer bulldozer core be more beneficial with encoding formats even though the Phenom2's have better IPC's?

Does kodi even support SLI/Crossfire...is there any benfiet to using the integrated APU's graphic? I can easily set the APU machine in the bios to use the more powerful card in the PCI slot otherwise the lower powered APU graphics chip-set will default if the program doesn't do SLI. If SLI doesn't work I would probably couple the APU with the GTS450 if the APU is the better processor.




Also, does Kodi take advantage of more multiple cores?

[DarrenHill]

Thread moved to Hardware

[joelbaby]

Can you drive a ferrari to do your shopping?

Kodi runs on a $30 raspberry pi, and on an intel compute stick. You dont need your old gaming pc. Whether it uses 1 core or 8 doesnt matter - your 2 hour movie will still take 2 hours to play.

[J876]

Can you drive a ferrari to do your shopping?

Kodi runs on a $30 raspberry pi, and on an intel compute stick. You dont need your old gaming pc. Whether it uses 1 core or 8 doesnt matter - your 2 hour movie will still take 2 hours to play.

Kodi will run on a RaspberryPi and an Intel Compute stick. How well it will run is another question.

I have a RaspberryPi and it is just fast enough and it is overclocked.

By the way the core count and the type of CPU core do matter.

The more cores there are, the better. Especially with modern operating systems and video software.

[ilovethakush]

Can you drive a ferrari to do your shopping?

Kodi runs on a $30 raspberry pi, and on an intel compute stick. You dont need your old gaming pc. Whether it uses 1 core or 8 doesnt matter - your 2 hour movie will still take 2 hours to play.

Kodi will run on a RaspberryPi and an Intel Compute stick. How well it will run is another question.

I have a RaspberryPi and it is just fast enough and it is overclocked.

By the way the core count and the type of CPU core do matter.

The more cores there are, the better. Especially with modern operating systems and video software.

This just isn't true but whatever

[wrxtasy]

Yes a bunch of OpenELEC Chromebox owners would totally disagree to, as they run a lowly 1.4Ghz Dual Core Celeron, but with an excellent GPU with 16 EU's for HD Graphics. Kodi loves powerful GPU's

[1995Turbo]

Yes a bunch of OpenELEC Chromebox owners would totally disagree to, as they run a lowly 1.4Ghz Dual Core Celeron, but with an excellent GPU with 16 EU's for HD Graphics. Kodi loves powerful GPU's

Thanks for the response.

At the moment the HTPC has Phenom 2 555 (two core @ 3.2 ghz). I get some picture tear from time to time... mostly when when there is a lot of movement and watching in 1080,

The Phenom2's are pretty old chipsets...I'm not sure that the instruction sets are optimal for video play back, that's why I was wondering is the new APU would be a better choice even thought the cores are not as powerful.

Does Kodi take advantage of more than 1 core in an x86/x64 system?

By the way, the HTPC is not OpenELEC, its a Win7.

[J876]

Yes a bunch of OpenELEC Chromebox owners would totally disagree to, as they run a lowly 1.4Ghz Dual Core Celeron, but with an excellent GPU with 16 EU's for HD Graphics. Kodi loves powerful GPU's

They may disagree but there are a lot of people who post stuff on this forum who try to do too much on
these low powered devices like transcoding, streaming, file serving etc and have a lot of problems and most
of them are CPU governed. Some encrypted connections can cause a RaspberryPi to slow down to a crawl and drop frames.

These devices have limits. That is why they are cheap.

You cannot upgrade anything on these things either.

It's all about what you need and what you want in your HTPC.

GPUs are important also, especially with the new HEVC codec.

[J876]

Can you drive a ferrari to do your shopping?

Kodi runs on a $30 raspberry pi, and on an intel compute stick. You dont need your old gaming pc. Whether it uses 1 core or 8 doesnt matter - your 2 hour movie will still take 2 hours to play.

Kodi will run on a RaspberryPi and an Intel Compute stick. How well it will run is another question.

I have a RaspberryPi and it is just fast enough and it is overclocked.

By the way the core count and the type of CPU core do matter.

The more cores there are, the better. Especially with modern operating systems and video software.

This just isn't true but whatever

Really? I own several systems both x86 and ARM and the fluidity of the Kodi interface, how fast it scans the library, how fast it
connects to streams depends on how fast the CPU/GPU combination is.

You cannot beat raw compute power.

[J876]

Yes a bunch of OpenELEC Chromebox owners would totally disagree to, as they run a lowly 1.4Ghz Dual Core Celeron, but with an excellent GPU with 16 EU's for HD Graphics. Kodi loves powerful GPU's

Thanks for the response.

At the moment the HTPC has Phenom 2 555 (two core @ 3.2 ghz). I get some picture tear from time to time... mostly when when there is a lot of movement and watching in 1080,

The Phenom2's are pretty old chipsets...I'm not sure that the instruction sets are optimal for video play back, that's why I was wondering is the new APU would be a better choice even thought the cores are not as powerful.

Does Kodi take advantage of more than 1 core in an x86/x64 system?

By the way, the HTPC is not OpenELEC, its a Win7.

Yes, Kodi and ffmpeg do take advantage of multiple CPU cores.

Like you said, it may be better to use the CPU with the more modern chipset. That way you have more options
when upgrading the GPU if you need to.

[J876]

I plan on upgrading my main rig later this year and would like to use the hand-me-downs to upgrade the home theater PC.

Option one is to take the Phenom 2 980 (4 core 3.7ghz) processor and mother board couple it with the GTS450 video card that is already in the PC.

Option two is to take the Llano (bulldozer core) APU from my wife's computer and give the wife the 980. The current processor in her machine is a Llano based APU, A8-3850, 2.9ghz built with bulldozer (turd-dozer) cores. The APU is currently cross-fired with A Readon 6670 video card.



Would the newer bulldozer core be more beneficial with encoding formats even though the Phenom2's have better IPC's?

Does kodi even support SLI/Crossfire...is there any benfiet to using the integrated APU's graphic? I can easily set the APU machine in the bios to use the more powerful card in the PCI slot otherwise the lower powered APU graphics chip-set will default if the program doesn't do SLI. If SLI doesn't work I would probably couple the APU with the GTS450 if the APU is the better processor.




Also, does Kodi take advantage of more multiple cores?

Please have a look on this section of the Kodi Wiki:

http://kodi.wiki/view/Devices

Also if you want to have a look at the capabilities and features of your AMD CPUs
have a look at this website:

http://products.amd.com/en-ca

[noggin]

Yes a bunch of OpenELEC Chromebox owners would totally disagree to, as they run a lowly 1.4Ghz Dual Core Celeron, but with an excellent GPU with 16 EU's for HD Graphics. Kodi loves powerful GPU's

They may disagree but there are a lot of people who post stuff on this forum who try to do too much on
these low powered devices like transcoding, streaming, file serving etc and have a lot of problems and most
of them are CPU governed. Some encrypted connections can cause a RaspberryPi to slow down to a crawl and drop frames.

These devices have limits. That is why they are cheap.

You cannot upgrade anything on these things either.

It's all about what you need and what you want in your HTPC.

GPUs are important also, especially with the new HEVC codec.

Actually - quite of lot of this is a bit wide of the mark.

The Celeron Chromeboxes aren't 'low powered devices' - the dual core Celeron 2955U they have in them is pretty powerful as it is based on the Core-series architecture, not the Atom stuff that some other Quad Core Celerons are based on. Sure they have twice the number of cores, but the cores are far less powerful, so the result is poorer. Couple that with some software not multithreading brilliantly - and you don't always get the power you think.

Then add on the fact that on some platforms (like Intel) the GPU does a lot of the grunt work in terms of deinterlacing and scaling - then the higher quality GPU (more EUs) coupled to a lower power CPU may still be a better choice. Then on other platforms (like the ARMs) it's the VPU not the GPU that does a lot of this stuff, and in some cases a high quality GPU can be let down by a poor quality VPU...

HEVC confuses the situation slightly as often it is implemented only in software on a lot of platforms with only very recent devices having GPU or VPU acceleration of HEVC and some platforms are still only hardware decoding 8 bit and can't cope with 10 bit.

If you want to do other stuff - like transcoding then sure, you may well need a decent CPU (Core i3 or better) unless you can off-load transcode duties to the GPU or VPU (Intel QuickSync in Windows for example)

Also - it's important when discussing Raspberry Pi stuff to ensure you mention which model you are talking about, as the CPU functionality on the three ranges are very different (A/A+/B/B+ have a single core 700MHz ARM core, the Zero has the same core at 1GHz, the Pi 2 B has a 900MHz 32 bit Quad Core Cortex A7 and the Pi 3 B has a 1.2GHz 64 bit Quad Core Cortex A53) I've not had major issues with VPNs on a Pi 2 or Pi 3 - and certainly get 20Mbs throughput in router mode on a Pi 2B. Sure a 700MHz single core Model B+ will struggle in many situations, but a Pi 3 B may well fly with 1.2GHz Quad 64 bit cores...

[1995Turbo]

Yes a bunch of OpenELEC Chromebox owners would totally disagree to, as they run a lowly 1.4Ghz Dual Core Celeron, but with an excellent GPU with 16 EU's for HD Graphics. Kodi loves powerful GPU's

Thanks for the response.

At the moment the HTPC has Phenom 2 555 (two core @ 3.2 ghz). I get some picture tear from time to time... mostly when when there is a lot of movement and watching in 1080,

The Phenom2's are pretty old chipsets...I'm not sure that the instruction sets are optimal for video play back, that's why I was wondering is the new APU would be a better choice even thought the cores are not as powerful.

Does Kodi take advantage of more than 1 core in an x86/x64 system?

By the way, the HTPC is not OpenELEC, its a Win7.

Yes, Kodi and ffmpeg do take advantage of multiple CPU cores.

Like you said, it may be better to use the CPU with the more modern chipset. That way you have more options
when upgrading the GPU if you need to.

I did read the wiki link you posted and it mentions little to nothing about instructions sets. The only think to instructions that I did see was to make sure the GPU can decode H.264.


I suppose I can just install Kodi on both machines and see which one feels more fluid. That should give me a move solid answer as to what hand-me-downs go into the HTPC.

[shabuboy]

It comes down to what you want to do with your machine and what kind of videos/sound you have/want.
Full blown HTPCs are not as popular these days as it used to be If only want a Kodi media player. Mini-PCs/Set-top-box are the choice combine with a NAS usually.
These media players tend to be small, silent and low-power consumption.

Did you read the sticky thread "Pick the Right Kodi Box (updated March 2016)"

My .02, if you can build a media player with what you have, go for it and test it. If you have to spend more than $40, I would buy something new/compact/cheap.

[1995Turbo]

It comes down to what you want to do with your machine and what kind of videos/sound you have/want.
Full blown HTPCs are not as popular these days as it used to be If only want a Kodi media player. Mini-PCs/Set-top-box are the choice combine with a NAS usually.
These media players tend to be small, silent and low-power consumption.

Did you read the sticky thread "Pick the Right Kodi Box (updated March 2016)"

My .02, if you can build a media player with what you have, go for it and test it. If you have to spend more than $40, I would buy something new/compact/cheap.

I already have an HTPC.... Had it for about 3 or 4 years now. I ended up getting a case/enclosure that looks like some type for old radio. No one knows its a computer until I turn it on.

What I would like is to not have any picture tearing during playback/stream during scenes with a lot of motion. The old setup in there is ok,..it definitely got better when I put my old GTS450 GPU in it over the standard integrated GPU on the motherboard but I know it could be better as I still get some tearing at 60hz playback.