[Wii60]

Hey guys,

I'm building a new media center on the cheap. Super cheap actually. Am I right in assuming that I can get just about any low end processor provided I get a decent graphics card? In this case a GeForce 210.

Thanks

[prae5]

Correct and then use vdpau under linux or dxva2 under windows.

[Wii60]

Correct and then use vdpau under linux or dxva2 under windows.

Awesome, thanks. Is there anything too low for xbmc to really run on?

[ion_man]

Awesome, thanks. Is there anything too low for xbmc to really run on?

I have tried using a 13 year old Pentium MMX 233Mhz board with a Nvidia 8400GS PCI card, but sadly the Nvidia card wasn't recognized by the BIOS and the PC wouldn't boot, so I guess it has to be at least something a bit newer, like a Pentium II or III.

Basically any mobo/cpu from the last 10 years should be fine.

[teaguecl]

The extreme of this is using a Tegra2 chipset instead of a low power x86. That's what the Boxee Box is doing, and it should retail at $200 with full 1080P support, fanless, diskless, silent. If you can afford to wait (rumors are July, though December might also be accurate) this will be a fantastic XBMC machine once we've cleaned that Boxee junk off of it

[Geeba]

Single core P4 @ 3.2Ghz with £35 nVidia 210 & xbmc live - 1080p roughly 7 - 10% CPU - nice!

[TeknoJnky]

just remember, while a video card may do 1080p with no problems, having too slow of a cpu/system will make the menus and everything else sluggish.

[ion_man]

just remember, while a video card may do 1080p with no problems, having too slow of a cpu/system will make the menus and everything else sluggish.

Not really, because the skins (menus and all) use openGL which is also hardware accelerated by the graphics chip.

XBMC menus look perfectly fine (fast and smooth) on my single core Atom based HTPC (which is slower than a P4 3.2Ghz) and that's with Intel 945GC graphics, not even Nvidia ION (I have a CrystalHD card for HD decoding)!

[TeknoJnky]

last I saw, a dev stated that the menus and main app are not really helped by video card.

even if they are, CPU still determines how fast non graphics processes and library database is processed/accessed/updated.

anyway, xbmc + appletv + linux is pretty snappy, so I would expect anything around 1ghz or more would be sufficient for most, but I would not want to run xbmc & windows at 1ghz (even with dx support).

[poofyhairguy]

You don't get a major speed boost in the menus by CPU- it levels off quickly. The real boost comes from a SSD.

My new Atom HTPC with a SSD is MUCH snappier in menus and loading fanart than my old HTPC with a Q6600 and a regular HD.