I put this together as it's very entertaining for myself to have a record of this and I figured someone else might find it interesting. Also interestingly this is some of the hardware I've used to develop and test Project64.
Old Home Theatre:
| CPU | AMD Sempron 3100 (Paris, L2/256K, 1.12-1.44v, SSE2) |
| Motherboard | ABIT KV80 (VIA K8M800) |
| RAM | DDR400 (Corsair, 2.5-3-3) |
| Graphics | XFX GeForce 6200 AGP 128MB (64-bit) |
So for a machine I put together a few years ago, this is actually pretty good. The Sempron was legendary for running very cool, having a very reasonable TDP of 62W, and as you see from the specs having the ability to dynamically change it's voltage to save power. The ABIT motherboard was selected due to it's MicroATX form factor and DDR400 support, it's been mostly stable but I will say that anything I've put in it made by ATI has been extremely unstable. I am going to avoid VIA chipsets in the future, and I should of known better.
The GeForce 6200, like the FX 5200 I owned before it, has been a mixed blessing. It has handled MPEG-2 acceleration moderately well I would say, the CPU usage while decoding 480i broadcast streams is still above where I felt it should be given it's hardware accelerated, but it worked. Unfortunately it could not hardware decode high definition 1080i MPEG-2 at all, 720i generally worked however as long as the bitrate was reasonable. The 3D performance can best be described at the time I purchased it as bleh, it was better than the 5200FX, but given the piece of crap a 5200 is that's not really a compliment. By today's standards it's not even a consideration for anyone wanting to run anything other than emulators like Project64.
I set out to build another media PC that..
- low power consumption
- quiet and throttled noise if possible
- more powerful by a significant margin
New Home Theatre:
| CPU | Intel Dual Core 2.0GHZ (E2180 Allendale, L2/1M, 0.85–1.5V, SSE3) |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L (Intel G31 M) |
| RAM | DDR2-800(Kingston, 5-5-5) |
| Graphics | MSI GeForce 8400GS PCI-X 256MB (64-bit) |
Went back to pure Intel chips, the fanboy in me cries with excitement. The biggest point of contention in trying to put this together was deciding whether or not get the nVidia 7150 based motherboards, or waiting for the new Intel X4500 integrated graphics. I ended up deciding to completely stay away from integrated graphics...
- nVidia 630i/7150
does not support dual channel DDR2 at all, and the benchmarks for the 7150 are basically at best 10-20% better than the GeForce 6200 I have now - Intel's X4500
is supposed to be an integrated graphics fanboy's wet dream. It has full acceleration for H.264 and is 1.7X faster than their current generation X3500. The downfall for me was this is not due out for another 6 months, and will likely be pretty expensive 125$US when paired with an HDMI port. Also while 1.7X the performance of the X3500 is very promising for integrated graphics, it's just that, a promise.
I ended up with another low end GeForce due to the fact that this is for a small form factor PC, and the next step up from this is an 8500/8600 and they either look like grandma's vaccuum cleaners, or have fans so weak that they melt onto the heatsinks. So now that we know all the odds and ends of this, let's see some benchmarks from 3D Mark 2005..
Overall given the benchmarks, it looks like I got a 3X increase in performance across the board with this upgrade, definitely nothing to shake a stick at so I'm quite happy.
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:29:27 PM
