2011-01-15, 18:39
Took me a bit to get smooth video and it was actually thanks to anandtech with a blurp saying that dxva2 was not working with these chips. I have 4TB of movies mostly encoded in 24fps on a Synology NAS. For the first few hours I was pulling my hair out as nothing would play well at all. I keep a stock of 1080 and 720p mostly in mkv but there are a few m2ts files in there as well. Most smack on these cpu's indicates 24fps content is not up to par yet.
Downloaded all the current intel drivers for the DH67CF board that I am running. Used web utility to check valid state on all. Curiously their own driver for this board doesn't check out as valid.
Had to go in to the intel driver and set 24 for the refresh rate on my Sony LCD. Went in to XBMC and set dxva2 to off. Sync to display and adjust refresh to match video is set and thats about it.
On 720p content I am looking at roughly 10 percent cpu usage across 4 cores. On 1080p I see about 17 percent on average. Curious its lower playing video then at idle in the XBMC interface. Idle is about 20 percent with Alaska skin running.
Playing a bluray disc (thanks to slysoft) is averaging 20 to 28 percent cpu usage. This could be due to the 30fps on the disc and the 24 refresh rate in the driver utility.
There are some gui quirks. Fast motion looks interpolated on bluray playback, again this could be my fault for not setting refresh back to 30. Stepped up from a Zotac ION dual core with Gforce 9400 gpu and the gui on Nvidia was very smooth with no screen blanking. On the i5 sandy bridge I get 5 to 8 second blank outs when starting a movie or escaping back to the gui of XBMC. Similarly when tabbing back in to the movie. The effects in the gui of the dvd cover expanding and retracting back to place was also smoother on Nvidia hardware.
Have this all running on Win7 Ultimate 64 with event ghost, slysoft and imon remote utility in operation. This is a k series cpu but upping the video core in the bios only makes the fan noise more apparent.
All in all its functional. I do see the jutter of a refresh frame consistently however after the investment I am not motivated to change out any more hardware. If I had to do it again I would have gone with an ION with the "next gen nvidia" graphics. I set my girl friend up on a Zotac mini PC with that chipset and hers is overall a better user experience than what I have currently. Smoother video, better drivers and a smoother gui.
Hope this helps anyone out there who, much like myself, is an early adopter and has purchased a sandy bridge cpu for their HTPC, or is considering one.
quotaholic
Downloaded all the current intel drivers for the DH67CF board that I am running. Used web utility to check valid state on all. Curiously their own driver for this board doesn't check out as valid.
Had to go in to the intel driver and set 24 for the refresh rate on my Sony LCD. Went in to XBMC and set dxva2 to off. Sync to display and adjust refresh to match video is set and thats about it.
On 720p content I am looking at roughly 10 percent cpu usage across 4 cores. On 1080p I see about 17 percent on average. Curious its lower playing video then at idle in the XBMC interface. Idle is about 20 percent with Alaska skin running.
Playing a bluray disc (thanks to slysoft) is averaging 20 to 28 percent cpu usage. This could be due to the 30fps on the disc and the 24 refresh rate in the driver utility.
There are some gui quirks. Fast motion looks interpolated on bluray playback, again this could be my fault for not setting refresh back to 30. Stepped up from a Zotac ION dual core with Gforce 9400 gpu and the gui on Nvidia was very smooth with no screen blanking. On the i5 sandy bridge I get 5 to 8 second blank outs when starting a movie or escaping back to the gui of XBMC. Similarly when tabbing back in to the movie. The effects in the gui of the dvd cover expanding and retracting back to place was also smoother on Nvidia hardware.
Have this all running on Win7 Ultimate 64 with event ghost, slysoft and imon remote utility in operation. This is a k series cpu but upping the video core in the bios only makes the fan noise more apparent.
All in all its functional. I do see the jutter of a refresh frame consistently however after the investment I am not motivated to change out any more hardware. If I had to do it again I would have gone with an ION with the "next gen nvidia" graphics. I set my girl friend up on a Zotac mini PC with that chipset and hers is overall a better user experience than what I have currently. Smoother video, better drivers and a smoother gui.
Hope this helps anyone out there who, much like myself, is an early adopter and has purchased a sandy bridge cpu for their HTPC, or is considering one.
quotaholic
