New hardware consideration

Im considering on buying a XBMCbox for my 1080p 42" tv.

After alot of searching im falling into this:
http://http://global.msi.com.tw/index.ph...cat_no=134

It looks fairly nice and has everything one should need for a HTPC box.

The only problem i see, is the graphics solution.
"On-board Graphics of NVIDIA GeForce 6150LE"

Is this powerful enough for running XBMC smoothly?

Review for ppl curious:
http://http://www.justechn.com/reviews/a...a_live.php

I guess your "alot of searching" excluded the forum?

yeah well ive read about hundred posts thru time but i havent got any real answer to this... so i wondered if there where any news of newer date

Afaik:

Geforce 6150 = Shader 3.0 = good (despite the LE-crap)

If you planning to playback 1080p-material with high bitrates you need a powerfull-cpu. Maybe the Athlon 64 x2 5200+ is capeable off...

Sounds nice then. Would be crap to buy a box with no possible gfx upgrade and no XBMC.

Planning on putting a AMD 64 X2 6000+ for max power. (cheap anyways).

How about RAM, 1 or 2 gb? Guess XBMC dont use that much ram anyways.

well.. since you can 2gb for like 30 euro's, 2gb is the way to go i guess..

hmm i wouldn't buy such a machine my self.. the 6150 is very low-end it has been stated that people with a Geforce 7050-7150 onboard sometimes have trouble rendering movies and UI @ 1080p...

When you definatly want a 'complete-htpc' make sure you have the option to add a more powerfull videocard.

For the price of the MSI Media Live + AMD 6000 XP2 + 2GB Ram you can build some decent machine your self without limitations..

Well my box is running a 6150 + AMD64 X2 3800+, on my 42inch 720P display, 720P tv shows run perfect even while running compiz, azureus, firefox, etc. But that bird scene in 1080p ran terrible. So I guess I wouldn't recommend that system if your planning on primarily running 1080P on it, but if you are helping someone with a 720P setup, its cheaper but does the trick.

CDNdevil Wrote:Well my box is running a 6150 + AMD64 X2 3800+, on my 42inch 720P display, 720P tv shows run perfect even while running compiz, azureus, firefox, etc. But that bird scene in 1080p ran terrible. So I guess I wouldn't recommend that system if your planning on primarily running 1080P on it, but if you are helping someone with a 720P setup, its cheaper but does the trick.

Similar setup here, 6150 but with a amd 3000+ , 32inch 720p display.. I can run up to 720p only.. anything higher craps out....

Does the 6150 have it's own dedicated framebuffer or does it borrow from the main system RAM? Just curious because that might explain some of the difficulty at higher resolutions (more competition for limited memory bandwidth).

mpw222 Wrote:Does the 6150 have it's own dedicated framebuffer or does it borrow from the main system RAM? Just curious because that might explain some of the difficulty at higher resolutions (more competition for limited memory bandwidth).

My onboard 6150 uses system ram.