Part III of the HTPC Series article

[Mastakilla]

Hi,

I'm kinda waiting for this article before buying my parents an HTPC.
Can Ganesh or anyone else give me an idea when it is expected?

I'm very interested in the videocard comparison (onboard amd/intel, non-onboard amd/nvidia) and also in the driver progress of AMD on Linux regarding HTPC functionality.

Thanks,

Masta

 

[Mastakilla]

Of course, the GPU is going to struggle with advanced scaling algorithms. We will cover that (along with 4K decode and display performance) in the third and final installment of our HTPC series. The concluding piece will pit the latest passive HTPC GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA against each other and provide readers with the insights on what exactly they have to offer over the Intel HD 4000 GPU.

Am I missing something perhaps? This was from December last year...

 

[tential]

Am I missing something perhaps? This was from December last year...

You can find tons of information about this on XBMC's website. I think they have a ton of information about what works in HTPCs and what you can do with what hardware.

 

[Mastakilla]

I know I can find tons of information everywhere, but nowhere I can find a complete, decent, up to date, reliabel overview of the up / down sides of the cpu's / chipsets (audio) / (onboard) videocards
or nothing even coming remotely close to that...

 

[dagamer34]

I know I can find tons of information everywhere, but nowhere I can find a complete, decent, up to date, reliabel overview of the up / down sides of the cpu's / chipsets (audio) / (onboard) videocards
or nothing even coming remotely close to that...

Because it doesn't exist. There is no turnkey solution for an HTPC, certainly not a parent/child proof one that you don't need to support yourself. Realistically, what you want is a single purpose box that runs XBMC perfectly that requires no management and I haven't found it yet. If you're building an actual HTPC with an underlying OS, you're doing it wrong.

I'd really like something like the Ouya with a Tegra 4 and a build of XBMC that works, but that's so far off. Sad. =/

 

[tential]

I know I can find tons of information everywhere, but nowhere I can find a complete, decent, up to date, reliabel overview of the up / down sides of the cpu's / chipsets (audio) / (onboard) videocards
or nothing even coming remotely close to that...

This is on XBMC's site on the hardware section. Just like I said. You won't find upside/downside of CPU because every CPU can run XBMC/HTPC software for the most part (maybe a few select skins or something but I even doubt that). The only upside/downside for CPU you'll find is powerconsumption/heat dissipation. This is hard to find for every processor though because HTPC processors ARENT REVIEWED, or at least not often.

You'll find most onboard VC will be fine, with a few exceptions (Certain VC on certain OS like OpenELEC and HDAudio, which I now have heard has drivers out to make it work anyway for this particular niche problem that I'm sure you won't even run into).

As for Audio, all the audio is run through HDMI for 95% of userse. So you won't have audio problems either.

Read this thread....
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=94199