Building a low-power htpc

M

Master [H]

2[H]4U
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I sorta had an HTPC before, but it was cobbled together and not really set for the purpose, but this time will be different. I want something low-power, inexpensive mb/cpu/ram part with HDMI that will do 1080p. I currently have a TV that is 720p, but once my kids are a little older or kill my current unit, I will move to something 1080p. I don't foresee 4K at this time.

Besides the MB/CPU/RAM, I don't believe I really need anything else. I have a case, PSU and hard drive. Mostly, this box is simply going to stream Netflix and Amazon Prime. I'm probably going to run Ubuntu as the OS and would be interested in powering it up via one of two Android 4.0+ cellphones (me and the missus), but I also have a Logitech K400 that would be used if nothing else.

Anyway. I'm considering this Biostar board as the base, plus about 4GB of DDR3. It seems to have good user reviews, but I just want to know if this will do 1080p or not.

Thanks.
 
i picked up the lenovo q190 a couple years ago. it has the celeron 887. Works great on streaming content and w/ xbmc. only issue w/ playback has been local hi10 content, which won't play at all. Apparently the playback issue is with the intel hd graphics gpu's lack of acceleration. At least the hd2000 is recommended for hardware accelerated playback.
 
mycomputersucks said:
Like the 847 and 887 the 1037u doesn't have Intel CVT which, i believe, is required for hardware accelerated playback.
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Absolutely not, Clear Video HD is just hardware support for the edge-case decode stuff like color correction, noise-reduction et-al. It's just post-processing cleanup.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...deo-hd/clear-video-hd-technology-general.html

See here for more detail on how this is just a clever marketing gimmick to make people think they are not getting hardware-accelerated decode:

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/03/21/intels-sandy-bridge-celerons-video-features-fused-off/

Intel said that the biggest difference was that the Celerons lack ‘Quicksync’, aka hardware assisted video encode. Video decode for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG2 are still fully hardware decoded in the Celeron GPUs. All of the APIs listed as supported, DirectX 10.1, OpenGLx, and the rest are the same as the CoreSomething models too.

The other major difference between the two is post processing, and those are all missing on the Celerons. These include Skin Tone Enhancement, Total Color Control, and Adaptive Contrast Enhancement. This is a curious choice because these should be done in the EUs, not the hardware, and the count of those hasn’t changed in the Celeron, nor has the clock moved much. It looks like this is a software/market differentiation thing more than anything else.
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If you're not going to be using shitty source material, then it won't make a bit of difference.
 
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fixitman said:
For a bit more money, you could get a much more powerful setup. Intel's newest low power celerons.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157494
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No, no, no, no, no, no.


Did I mention NO?

The Celeron 1037u uses the latest Haswell architecture, while the Celeron J1900 uses Bay Trail, a tablet-oriented architecture. The Bay Trail tries to make up for it's poor performance per-clock by adding two more cores, but even with those extra cores it can NEVER outperform the Haswell Celeron. See the Passmark compared here, which uses every core it can get:

Haswell 1.8 GHz, 2 CORES:

FGVsRwB.jpg


Bay Trail 2.0 GHz, 4 CORES:

Q1f62iY.jpg


For programs that can't scale as well as Passmark, The Haswell Celeron's performance is TWICE that of the Bay Trail Celeron. And that's really what you'll see in daily use of an HTPC: mostly single-threaded loads.

Then there's the massive GPU performance difference. In order to save cost and power, Intel only put 4 EUs on Bay Trail, which makes it even slower than Ivy Bridge Celeron (has 6 EUs). The Haswell Celeron has 10 EUs, so you can imagine it's TWICE AS POWERFUL AS BAY TRAIL!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7933/the-desktop-kabini-review-part-1-athlon-5350-am1/6

Haswell HD Graphics should be somewhere between Ivy Bridge HD graphics and HD 4000, even though it's not included specifically in that review, you can estimate it. The Bay Trail Celeron still trails Ivy Bridge HD Graphics in every single benchmark in the article I linked!

CLIFF NOTES:

The Celeron 1037U is a STEAL for that price. It has enough GPU performance improvement over the old Celeron 847 to game BARELY, and it also doesn't sacrifice single-threaded performance nearly as drastically as the old Celeron 847 did. It also has the 23 Hz fix introduced with Ivy Bridge (and perfected with Haswell), which is important for smooth video playback on an HDTV.
 
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mycomputersucks said:
i picked up the lenovo q190 a couple years ago. it has the celeron 887. Works great on streaming content and w/ xbmc. only issue w/ playback has been local hi10 content, which won't play at all. Apparently the playback issue is with the intel hd graphics gpu's lack of acceleration. At least the hd2000 is recommended for hardware accelerated playback.
Click to expand...

hi10p is not supported in hardware by ANY GPUs in existence. This is the reason your Celeron 887 choked on it - you need more processing power.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Hi10P

Anyone seriously considering edge cases like hi10p (anime rips mostlty) should consider a full-fledged desktop processor. A Celeron at 2.7 GHz should be more than enough.
 
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Intel HD does 1080p fine. I double check my rips which are 14-16Mb/s h264 and they playback full screen no problem. Also plays the native blueray as well full screen.


Thats on my i7-3770 desktop, Ivy Bridge i5 laptop and haswell celeron Acer 720 chromebook.
 
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