Geeba
2008-12-29, 14:56
Christmas being the time of new things and me being a bit of a skip-rat :laugh: was given an old PC, boredom on boxing day led me to take a look at it.
Thought I'd pass on my findings...
It turned out to be what I would describe as reasonably high spec for its age..
P4 3Ghz HT CPU, ATI 9600, 200Gb SATA HDD, DVB-TV card and all the usual WLAN card, 5.1 Sound card etc... as it was a media-PC
So I thought (being an Xbox user as my main XBMC platform) a cheap HTPC, which might replace the Xbox if I could get it going and get a case small enough to hide its full sized ATX board.... As I dont want to use my Office PC in my lounge... (yet :laugh:)
So after getting it running and loading a fresh copy of Vista, new BIOS, and every updated driver possible, I the overclocked it within an inch off its life! :cool:
Ended up 3.5Ghz, 2 Gb RAM, 1Gbps LAN, Vista Ultimate performance score of 3.6 (as the GFX card is a bit naff) 4.2 for CPU.
I loaded up XBMC-Windows and set it up as my other testbed machine is.... even with the CPU thrashed it couldnt play anything from my 720p test folder, even 4Gb 720p MKV rips... :no: (cant rember res).
To be honest it was no more of an improvement over the 733Mhz Xbox as far as H264 was concerned. :shocked: (well in Devs on a dam fine piece of software/coding!)
So single (HT) core P4 CPU's and recycling old PC's is a no no for XBMC at the mo... real shame as this PC even had the M$ Media remote.
I might give XBMC-Live a bash... smaller footprint etc... see if I can get a cheap HTPC and entry level 720 playback.
Anyone had any luck with old CPU's? non C2D?
Thought I'd pass on my findings...
It turned out to be what I would describe as reasonably high spec for its age..
P4 3Ghz HT CPU, ATI 9600, 200Gb SATA HDD, DVB-TV card and all the usual WLAN card, 5.1 Sound card etc... as it was a media-PC
So I thought (being an Xbox user as my main XBMC platform) a cheap HTPC, which might replace the Xbox if I could get it going and get a case small enough to hide its full sized ATX board.... As I dont want to use my Office PC in my lounge... (yet :laugh:)
So after getting it running and loading a fresh copy of Vista, new BIOS, and every updated driver possible, I the overclocked it within an inch off its life! :cool:
Ended up 3.5Ghz, 2 Gb RAM, 1Gbps LAN, Vista Ultimate performance score of 3.6 (as the GFX card is a bit naff) 4.2 for CPU.
I loaded up XBMC-Windows and set it up as my other testbed machine is.... even with the CPU thrashed it couldnt play anything from my 720p test folder, even 4Gb 720p MKV rips... :no: (cant rember res).
To be honest it was no more of an improvement over the 733Mhz Xbox as far as H264 was concerned. :shocked: (well in Devs on a dam fine piece of software/coding!)
So single (HT) core P4 CPU's and recycling old PC's is a no no for XBMC at the mo... real shame as this PC even had the M$ Media remote.
I might give XBMC-Live a bash... smaller footprint etc... see if I can get a cheap HTPC and entry level 720 playback.
Anyone had any luck with old CPU's? non C2D?