some E350/HD 6310 results - AMD Zacate on MSI E350IA-E45

Hi wicky, thanks for the report. Could you measure the consumption with XBMC idle and black screensaver "running"?

i've just installed the case and now figuring out how to make a boot usb drive

but the fan is not noticable ... it's extremely quiet !

how hot should a amd processor max get ?
i think i'm gonna get an extra 4cm fan to put in the side ...

Hi , I have nearly the same setup like you ( MSI e350 ) and after playing around some hours i can confirm that XBMC runs quite fine under Ubuntu 10.10 with VA.

H264 runs perfect with ~15% CPU usage on both cores ( high Bitrate mkv ) .

I have installed the latest ATI Drivers and followed these instructions :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=80940

( Choose the latest VAAPI lyberys , instead of the old ones mentioned in the thread )


After that I applyed the patch from this thread to avoid stuttering :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=86581&page=7

Now everything runs fine

Laserfreak Wrote:Hi , I have nearly the same setup like you ( MSI e350 ) and after playing around some hours i can confirm that XBMC runs quite fine under Ubuntu 10.10 with VA.

H264 runs perfect with ~15% CPU usage on both cores ( high Bitrate mkv ) .

I have installed the latest ATI Drivers and followed these instructions :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=80940

( Choose the latest VAAPI lyberys , instead of the old ones mentioned in the thread )


After that I applyed the patch from this thread to avoid stuttering :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=86581&page=7

Now everything runs fine

Cool, that is great to know.

a11599 Wrote:Hi wicky, thanks for the report. Could you measure the consumption with XBMC idle and black screensaver "running"?

I'll confirm this soon, but I suspect CPU usage and power draw to be the same as the xbmc idle figure I posted on the first post. The CPU is handling all the work of running xbmc, unlike during video decoding where the CPU is doing less work and the gnu does it's job. It seems strange that the system consumes less power running a 1080p video than it does sitting idle.

I'll also retest everything once I get a chance to do some overclocking, Im fairly certain there is 100-200mhz to gain on that CPU. I'm betting one of these chips at about 2ghz will be perfection. Temperatures are not always the best indicaters of stability, but from what I've read 70c is going to be fine, if not higher. I'll torture this thing and find out for sure lol.

And great news laserfreak! I hadn't had a chance to test outside of windows 7, but glad your findings are similar! I think with Intel locking Nvidia out in favor of their own horrible IGPs they are all but forcing people to jump into AMDs arms in the next generations of these products. So better linux support is going to be critical.

I would really like to see AMD add a dedicated side port memory system for the igp though. as good as the 6310 is, I think performance in many ways (certainly games) could improve without having to use system ram.

Laserfreak Wrote:Hi , I have nearly the same setup like you ( MSI e350 ) and after playing around some hours i can confirm that XBMC runs quite fine under Ubuntu 10.10 with VA.

H264 runs perfect with ~15% CPU usage on both cores ( high Bitrate mkv ) .

I have installed the latest ATI Drivers and followed these instructions :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=80940

( Choose the latest VAAPI lyberys , instead of the old ones mentioned in the thread )


After that I applyed the patch from this thread to avoid stuttering :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=86581&page=7

Now everything runs fine

nice !
i'm downloading xbmc live as we speak
hopefully it's not too hard for me :$

in windows 7 it goes a bit stuttering when browsing movies but i think this is because of the slow and old HDD and only 100mbit ...

@Laserfreak could you test this movie (for some reason its not working on hd4200 with latest libva etc & patched xbmc). Mplayer-vaapi says HP@L4.1 is max for xvba-video driver...

too bad i cant get the live 10.1 not to a usbboot device for windows it was ok

nemek Wrote:@Laserfreak could you test this movie (for some reason its not working on hd4200 with latest libva etc & patched xbmc). Mplayer-vaapi says HP@L4.1 is max for xvba-video driver...

It runs , but with some heavy noise

some pics:




Also worth pointing out that the fan is just screwed into the heatsink like any other one, its not a flat integrated one, so swapping it out for a nice silent one is an easy trick. I think a pair of decent chipset coolers is all you will need to have a solid passive machine.