New HTPC: PentiumD 820 dual core or Athlon64?

[Aaron]

The question is...

Is an PentiumD 820 (dual core) better then Athlon64 3200+ when running as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) / Server? They are the same price for CPU & mobo.


I will be any combination of these...

Homeseer (home automation - X10, web pages, etc)
XLobby
NetRemote

and possibly video player to deinterlace and convert o 1080i or 1080p output for HDTV (using a current gen HDTV tuner card).


thoughts?

[Aaron]

51 views and no votes...

Is it that none of the 51 people have any clue about CPUs or are you all afraid to voice your opinions?

[rubbah]

i don't have a clue..

[ComputerTimeCO]

Hi Aaron,

I am by no means an expert at this but I'll give you my personal opinion. I feel HTPCs do not need to be the most powerful PC available. It needs to be reliable more than anything else. There are some issues with 64bit processors and Operating Systems. So my guess would be that you will see problems with this dual core technology too. I would stick with a 32bit processor myself. I would also choose the Intel over the AMD. It seems more people have more issues with AMD supported board than Intel especially with PVR hardware.

I think the Dual core tech will be great but better suited for professional workstations.

Regards,
Carm.

[anarkizt]

I dont know much about anything about the PentiumD but I have a AMD64 3500+ and I cannot run all the filters algorithms in ffdshow that I wanna do.

So I dont agree with the statement that htpc's dont need to be powerful. You need all the juice you can get. (I have even overclocked mine to 2400Mhz instead of stock 2200Mhz).

Check http://www.tomshardware.com for cpu charts and just get the fastest sob that you can afford!

But in htpcs, another big thing is that you want it to be quiet. This is not consistent with the speed issue.

(I run Windows x64 as well if that is of any importance to you)

[Aaron]

I dont know much about anything about the PentiumD but I have a AMD64 3500+ and I cannot run all the filters algorithms in ffdshow that I wanna do.

So I dont agree with the statement that htpc's dont need to be powerful. You need all the juice you can get. (I have even overclocked mine to 2400Mhz instead of stock 2200Mhz).

Check http://www.tomshardware.com for cpu charts and just get the fastest sob that you can afford!

But in htpcs, another big thing is that you want it to be quiet. This is not consistent with the speed issue.

(I run Windows x64 as well if that is of any importance to you)

I agree with you on the speed. I was hoping someone had PentiumD experiences to share. It seems like the way to go since it can multitask much better then any single CPU. This is helpful when running more then one program or a multi-threaded app. I'm guessing XL is multi-threaded, maybe Steven can chime in on this?

[Naylia]

Go with one of the AMD Athlon64s. Look into the versions with Venice Cores. They run significantly cooler than anything else out there of comparable speed.

Here they are at newegg:
Vencie Cored Athlon64s at Newegg

I don't think dual-core is a high priority for HTPCs. While nice to have most of us have spent money to make sure we don't need it. (ie...hardware encoding capture cards, hardware encoding Dolby Digital) I don't think you get full efficinecy from a dual core cpu letting XLobby idle in the background while watching movie or playing a game. If you tend to be doing only one thing at once you may actually take a performance hit from a dual core. Single Cores have been shown to still be better for gaming.