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AMD Live! HTPC

Join the community - in the OCAU Forums! Date  13th March 2009 Author  dirtyd Editor  James "Agg" Rolfe Manufacturer  AMD Image Quality, CPU/Power Usage, Conclusion Image Quality: A few select screen captures of DVD and TV playback for your judgement. Bear in mind these have been JPG'd: DVD up scaled to 1080p This was from Spider-Man, from the scene near the lockers where Peter Parker is discovering his “Spidey sense” in a fight with Flash, the woefully scripted high school jock. ABC HDTV You guessed it, ABC News. Blu Ray Blu Ray and its associated HDCP shenanigans make you jump through a million hoops to get a simple screen capture, so I resorted to taking photos of the screen. Not exactly scientifically accurate, but you can still get an idea of the image quality - which is quite frankly brilliant, but that’s to be expected with Blu Ray! I performed another subjective test where I compared the Blu Ray playback from a Sony Playstation 3 to the playback from this HTPC, on a Sony KDL40X2000 40” LCD. Neither I nor my friend could spot any difference in intra-frame or inter-frame image quality, which I found surprising given the considerable optimisation that I imagine went into Blu Ray playback on the PS3. CPU Usage: How much image processing can this system offload onto the GPU? Quite a bit, it turns out. DVD up scaled to 1080p The Phenom X4 9350e is barely troubled with a simple DVD up scaling, leaving the majority of the work for the 780G chipsets integrated graphics. Blu Ray playback @ 1080p Although the timing of the screenshot seems to indicate the CPU usage is half that of the DVD up scaling (5% compared to 10% if you look at the number on the left), the graph clearly shows the CPU is under more strain, but it’s still not even near 25% load, which is great for system temperatures and multi-tasking headroom. TV playback I assume the communications with the PCI-X card and associated processing overhead is placing more stress on the CPU during TV playback, but as you can see it’s still quite far from taxing the CPU. TV recording Funnily enough it seems to be less of a strain actually recording TV shows to the HDD. Power Usage: The graph speaks for itself. It’s worth keeping in mind that these power draw figures are inclusive of a sound card that was powering 5 speakers. Idle usage, whilst not excessive, could be lower, and I suspect would be a great deal lower with an under-volted & under-clocked 45nm Phenom II or a 45W dual core like the Athlon X2 4850e. Conclusion: It’s hard not to like what AMD has done here. Although plenty of enthusiasts have been building their own HTPC’s for a few years now, giving rise to Linux distributions like Mythbuntu, and others, that option has been firmly in the domain of people with above average technical abilities and a passion that will abide the generally substantial amount of time needed to iron out the wrinkles. The AMD Live! platform provides a familiar Windows-based experience, which works well in combination with Thermaltake’s resold iMon LCD & remote package. The hardware involved in this solution has been well selected to be powerful enough for the latest high definition multim edia content and simultaneously efficient enough to minimise the heat and noise output. Four cores with a cutting-edge cooler, highly capable onboard graphics from the 780G chipset, an interesting audio amplifier, a quiet hard drive, Blu Ray combo drive, a highly customisable LCD with an excellent remote all mix together to result in a system that can handle any current media format you can throw at it, in a low power and low noise package. If you’ve been waiting for HTPC to gain wide-spread industry support, it could be time for you to take the plunge. << Back OCAU Main Page Select Page Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 -

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