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StevenSeagull · 2009-01-16, 19:41

I spent half my life as a computer technician and field support. Only recently started to discover overclocking in depth and i must admit i like it. Still wouldn't reccomend it for mission critical tasks (servers). a week ago i tried to run 1080p on a single core (2.4Ghz) amd 3800+ and quite honestly it did fail. Well after clocking it at 3Ghz by fsb only, i managed to play the short cartoon by pixar - Presto (roughly 12min) without a single frame drop. Did that with low quality ddr2@533 and 1Gig of ram (why would one need 2-4Gigs for xbmc is beyond me). 720p content uses 45-51% of that cpu. I think im keeping that junk althrough i have an extra c2d 4500 since i intended it for the first xbmc box which should do better and clocks to 3Ghz easily.

StevenSeagull · 2009-01-17, 14:14

Update: Cant play reliably all the planet earth 1080p videos, can however many more 1080p which are less taxing (lower res). Even with analog output.

xexe · 2009-01-20, 10:32

I have now made the decision based on the excellent replies that it is not worth me spending money on a system that will play most/90%+ 1080p.

This thread still has value to people that already have this CPU but IMO its a false economy to purchase/design a new system based on anything short of an E8400.

Thank you for all your excellent information.

StevenSeagull · 2009-01-20, 20:29

An e8400 is quite simply an overkill for 1080p. I have one althrough clocked to 3.6Ghz and playing 1080p content on it is a very light task. An older 2.2 / 2.4Ghz c2d will do the trick.

tcman47 · 2009-01-20, 21:16

For comparison my htpc is based on older equipment : running an amd fx-55 cpu and a nvidia 7900gto graphics card, memory is 3gb of ddr2 and the os is xp.

It plays 1080P just fine, never have noticed any problems with anything, however i would like to test my system, i have downloaded the killa sample to test my rig with but beyond that i am not really sure how to go about it, if someone could give me some pointers that would be great.

TC

xexe · (This post was last modified: 2009-01-20, 22:35 by xexe.)

StevenSeagull Wrote:An e8400 is quite simply an overkill for 1080p. I have one althrough clocked to 3.6Ghz and playing 1080p content on it is a very light task. An older 2.2 / 2.4Ghz c2d will do the trick.

An E8400 is in fact the recommended XBMC CPU by XBMC and as such is not "quite simply an overkill". I agree less can play most but based on real world recounts here and in other threads anything less will likely not play ALL 1080p content.

As i say if you have a CPU that you can try then definitely try it but if your buying one after many hours reading accounts here and talking to people in IRC an E8400 is the current solution.

tcman47 Wrote:For comparison my htpc is based on older equipment : running an amd fx-55 cpu and a nvidia 7900gto graphics card, memory is 3gb of ddr2 and the os is xp.

It plays 1080P just fine, never have noticed any problems with anything, however i would like to test my system, i have downloaded the killa sample to test my rig with but beyond that i am not really sure how to go about it, if someone could give me some pointers that would be great.

TC

This is a good example of a statement that can be misread. You say you have no problems then go on to say you need to test your system, better to know if it plays everything.

I mean no offence to anyone but there are far more posts with subjective answers than definitive ones in this forum... and you are quite correct the only way to stop being subjective is to have a suite of test samples and means to report on them using copy and paste of results.

Real people are paying real money based on subjective posts (again no offence meant people posting is always great Smile

Edit: I looked and i can no longer find the 3.0Ghz reference in the wiki. It might have been from dev discussions in IRC. So a citation is needed for my E8400 statement

**ashlar** · 2009-01-20, 23:22

A DualCore Duo clocked at 3.0 GHz is *needed* to playback without losing frames the killer sample. That's an h264 videostream which peaks at around 40Mbit. Exactly the top video bitrate for BluRay (http://www.videohelp.com/hd). Hence, if one wants to be sure, 3.0GHz is not overkill. Plain and simple.

And this ain't subjective. I agree with xexe: you either provide hard data or else... silence is golden. People are easily misled when looking for info on forums and reading the wrong posts.