Media Center super slow on Radeon 5450?

I hope someone else has had / resolved a similar issue! I recently build up a new machine as my HTPC. I previously had an AMD E-350 board (dual core 1.6GHz Bobcat CPU) but I added a Ceton InfiniTV tuner card and Xbox 360's around the house as media center extenders and the little CPU just couldn't keep up. However the machine itself ran fine locally in Media Center. It would only bog down if more than 2 simultaneous TV streams were running.

I upgraded to a new machine with the following specs:

Gigabyte 760G board
Phenom II X6 1045T
XFX One 512MB Radeon 5450 card
4GB DDR3 1333 (2gb x2)

Now it seem with the new machine, Windows Aero and Media Center are super slow. The Windows performance test gives a score of 2.0 for Aero! (IIRC it's between 5 and 6 for gaming performance). TV stream playback is super choppy unless I reduce Media Center to a window about 1/4 the size of the screen (running 1080P). This doesn't seem to make sense -- The 5450 should be a little faster than the 6310 core in the E-350, yet it is drastically slower and completely unusable for watching full-screen TV. Is there something I am missing here? I have tried the 12.8 drivers, 12.2 drivers, and the Windows 8 Preview-specific drivers. I have tried it in both Windows 7 and Windows 8 preview. Is there some feature in the 6xxx series chips that would make such a huge difference, where a slower chip would work fine?

I should also follow up -- the Xbox 360 media center extenders run flawlessly -- the user interface is nice and smooth and video has no problems whatsoever. As far as I know the Media Center Extender video decoding is done on the Media Center host PC so that would seem to indicate that it's not a problem with the actual video decoding itself. Also the CPU usage with 1 stream is well under 10% where with the previous machine it would use 40+% with just the local stream.

You could disable aero.

If reduce mosquito noise is enabled, disable it in the CCC.

i would bet the issue isnt with the GPU

I am guessing that it is hard drive related.

Media Center hits hard drives hard.... the guide is the worst

if you are using a HDD or a drive that is failing it would make sense for your problems.

SSDs are king!

A dying HDD is what I was thinking too, I've got a 1.2Ghz Athlon X2 and a 5450 and it runs fast and smooth even though it's only using a 7200rpm HDD. I will be upgrading it with a 36 gig SSD soon though.

I got it resolved -- it seems that the Radeon 6000 series (even the wimpy 6310 in the E-350) is very much superior to the 5000 series when it comes to 2d and video decoding. I did some more research and ended up going with the Radeon 6450, which is quite a bit more powerful than the 5450 and also has the upgraded video decoding. The difference was like night and day -- it fired right up with perfectly smooth video and the Media Center menus / transition effects have no hint of lag or jitter.

I didn't think hard drive would be an issue since I was watching live TV streams (from Ceton InfiniTV card) although I suppose the TV pause buffer could have had an impact there. For reference the drives I'm using are Micro Center SandForce 60GB SSD for OS / Apps and WD Caviar Green 640GB for media storage. Probably going to get a 2TB Caviar Green from either MC or Amazon since they seem to be going for a reasonable price, right around $100

In case anyone is interested in the performance, I tested it with 2 Xboxes streaming Live TV, local screen playing Live TV and one show recording to disk, and even with the CPU under-clocked to 1.4GHz (to keep heat / fan noise down, Phenom II X6) it was easily able to handle all of the workloads with well under 50% CPU usage.

Now if only I could remember how to get the damn AMD HDMI audio driver to output multi-channel...

Update the thread when you remember how to get the AMD HDMI to do multi-channel.

I'm upgrading from an older 3000 series ATI card to a newer ATI video card. I have to use an older driver just to get any HDMI audio from the card.