Surprised (positively) about Zacate speed and price

[alyarb]

All the 939 systems I know are dead. How can you act like this? How can you be so cold?


It's what keeps me alive.


No, it's what keeps you alone.

 

[cebalrai]

The pro vs against debate is irrelevant here. I was given a budget of 200€ and for that I had to either buy a used computer or assemble a new one. Usage is e-mail, skype and web browsing. Movie playback / youtube distant 17th.
Since I already had lots of parts for a new one, I took that route and still kept the actual expenditure low enough.
I have seriously considered i3 and llano, but both of them required 200€ or more just for MB and CPU. The top-of-the-line MB for this zacate was 150€ and this tipped the scale in its favor.

You can get an A4 Llano for much cheaper than that. Still not as cheap as Zacate though.

 

[Arkadrel]

Update:
The whole setup takes <20W at idle
33W at full load running Prime95

It also plays my BD-rip of Gladiator with no frame dropping at 50% CPU usage (ffdshow DXVA).
The codecs installed are SAF 6.00 (not unlocked)

Now overclock it to 1.9ghz-2.0ghz
(a 25% boost in mhz, might help it abit)

 

[velis]

You can get an A4 Llano for much cheaper than that. Still not as cheap as Zacate though.

Remember I'm not in the U.S.
The absolutely cheapest I can go with llano is 90&#8364; for the proc and 60&#8364; for MB, but that is only now, two weeks later. When I was buying, over here there was nothing but 3850, which is even now 130&#8364;... Also the few motherboards that were available were far from 60&#8364; as well.

Naturally, buying zacate for price/performance doesn't make much sense. It's actually ridiculously expensive.
However, given the low performance requirements and super low power consumption, in this case it's worth it. I think. May be wrong though, will see this weekend when I deliver it...
If uncle says it sux, I will just return it and buy a more powerful setup used....

 

[deimos3428]

I have an E-350 which I use for recording and playing HDTV w/Windows Media Center. (NB: I access it via an Xbox360 as a Media Extender... the E-350 itself doesn't even have a monitor/keyboard/mouse attached unless I'm doing maintenance, so it pretty much acts as a server. Storage is on a NAS.)

It plays 1080p (dvr-ms, wtv) flawlessly, but I don't think I'd enjoy surfing the web with it. My P4 definitely can't do the things it does. An Athlon II X2 was on the short list, but it would've been louder and/or hotter. The box is SFF with a dual tv tuner and stays on 24/7/365, so heat matters a lot. With a larger case I would have probably gone with the Athlon.

 

[pauldun170]

Side by side comparison using a fresh windows 7 install on both Zacate (not sure of which one) and my old...archaic 2.8 P4 using an AGP 7600gt (agp version of that card doesn't do decode like the pcie version)

1080p video - Zacate
EVERYTHING else (general usage, responsiveness) - My old P4

Not by a huge margin or anything, but the P4 still hung in there. Its rather quick actually loading up Office 2010, web pages, flash videos. The only issue is that its an inefficient pig of a processor that sucks up juice.

Zacate is still good for what it is.

 

[sm625]

300 euro is $400. For $400 I'd get a llano A4 notebook instead. Cant think of one way where it wouldnt be a better choice. Less video output options perhaps. Slightly less upgradeability. A wee bit more load power consumption (understandable).

Just saw this on a nother site: "AMD FUSION A4 Llano HP g6 15.6'LAPTOP for 371$ after 50$ mail in rebate in staples"

Even best buy has a fair priced offering: "HP Pavilion g4-1117dx 14 in. Notebook, 320GB, 4GB, AMD A-Series A4-3300M at Best Buy $380"

 

[Zap]

I do think that we're within a generation of having something in a similar power profile that doesn't suck though. I think something in the range of the stock Athlon II 250 performance levels would be a great deal at 10 watts or less, and I'm sure it's close.

The E-350 is 18W, not 10W. And yes, we're there with mobile CPUs. The E-350 is AFAIK the same CPU whether in an ITX motherboard or a notebook. You can get similar wattage Sandy Bridge mobile chips, but they mostly find their way into notebooks.

Then again, even the desktop Sandy Bridge chips get within spitting distance of power usage.

 

[busydude]

300 euro is $400. For $400 I'd get a llano A4 notebook instead.

It does not work that way.

 

[sm625]

It does not work that way.

You may not be able to go to best buy but I'm sure there are sales and deals jsut like here.

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

You may not be able to go to best buy but I'm sure there are sales and deals jsut like here.

I think he means there is just a much more limited number of choices, and I'm betting the tax (VAT?) is pretty high compared to here. I think I saw someone talk about the tax being like 20-30% on top of purchases. It has been a while so forgive my memory if I'm totally off base.

 

[Arg Clin]

Very happy with my E-350 for HTPC. 1080p and Blu Ray works fine as long as there's support for GPU decoding, which basically covers everything I need in a HTPC.

(Some research should be conducted beforehand to make sure you don't need CPU 1080p decoding)

Built another E-350 for my mother as SMB pc - she's very happy with the fact that it's almost completely fanless, and way more responsive than her old single core P4 seemed for webbrowsing and such. Since it's a 24/7 machine, there's quite a nice saving on the electric bill in the long run also.

 

[Arkaign]

The E-350 is 18W, not 10W. And yes, we're there with mobile CPUs. The E-350 is AFAIK the same CPU whether in an ITX motherboard or a notebook. You can get similar wattage Sandy Bridge mobile chips, but they mostly find their way into notebooks.

Then again, even the desktop Sandy Bridge chips get within spitting distance of power usage.

Yeah that's kinda what I'm getting at. I mentioned the AII-250 only as a performance baseline that I would consider minimal for a daily-use general task PC or notebook these days. Anything slower than that is something I consider just a little bit too anemic.

It's too bad Asus or whomever doesn't make a mobo with the mobile SB socket and notebook ddr3 slots, it would make for an awesome itx platform. It would blow the doors off of Zacate and Atom, and be worth spending a few extra bucks on for sure.

Looks like the chips are pretty cheap :

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-mobil...gen-/360398758601?pt=CPUs&hash=item53e970a2c9

It makes me think back to the days when you could find desktop socket 479 boards and run the Core Duo notebook chips like a boss

 

[Arkaign]

Side by side comparison using a fresh windows 7 install on both Zacate (not sure of which one) and my old...archaic 2.8 P4 using an AGP 7600gt (agp version of that card doesn't do decode like the pcie version)

1080p video - Zacate
EVERYTHING else (general usage, responsiveness) - My old P4

Not by a huge margin or anything, but the P4 still hung in there. Its rather quick actually loading up Office 2010, web pages, flash videos. The only issue is that its an inefficient pig of a processor that sucks up juice.

Zacate is still good for what it is.

Yeah from what I've seen (just refurbed a P4 for someone the other day, they needed the old serial and parallel ports for old POS equipment, and after putting in 2GB of DDR2 and a new 1TB WD Blue drive in, it absolutely flew through his UPS Worldship, Fedex software, Quickbooks POS, and so on. Before it had an old 80GB drive and 1GB of DDR2-533, and it was really struggling.

 

[hoorah]

This topic is pretty interesting to me, as I was on the verge of replacing my second HTPC (A64 939 3200+) with a zacate platform. The 939 system doesn't sleep properly (never has since vista, BSODs on resume always), making it a bit inefficient (at 130W) to use as an HTPC for anything other than occasional use. I had assumed that even something terribly underpowered like an Atom or Zacate chip would be much faster than the 3200+, but it seems that may not be the case?

I was considering selling the 3200+ on craigslist, maybe getting $40 or so for it, and that would offset the new setup to the point where the power savings would cover the additional cost, but the 3200+ (with a DXVA video card) is on the bare minimum side of a decent Win7 media center experience. Not sure I would want to go any slower than I already am in terms of responsiveness. Wife can't get frustrated with waiting or we question the whole HTPC experience......

 

[hoorah]

All the 939 systems I know are dead. How can you act like this? How can you be so cold?


It's what keeps me alive.


No, it's what keeps you alone.

+1 for bond quote, -1 because I can't get rid of my 939 systems, they keep working well despite being inefficient. Okay, I'll give you +2 for the bond quote

 

[Zap]

It's too bad Asus or whomever doesn't make a mobo with the mobile SB socket and notebook ddr3 slots, it would make for an awesome itx platform. It would blow the doors off of Zacate and Atom, and be worth spending a few extra bucks on for sure.

I don't think we're missing a whole lot. The thing is that with Sandy Bridge CPUs, under idle conditions the desktop CPUs already exhibit super low power draw. Right now I'm fiddling with a 2500K using IGP and it idles UNDER 30W from the wall (web browsing, etc.), with a desktop 7200RPM HDD and 450W PSU. I'm sure a notebook HDD or SSD + lower wattage and higher efficiency PSU can probably knock at least 5W off that. This is a Core i5-2500K!!! How about a Pentium Dual Core 620T?

But, if you insist... not ITX motherboard, but there are some mini barebones that use mobile CPUs.

Giada has some that use the first gen Core series, such as the Core i3-330UM.

ASRock has a bunch, mostly older Core series, but a couple of new gen ones too. Not cheap, but they are essentially complete systems minus operating system.

Of course there are still barebones on the market (and I think even some rare ITX boards) that use the older Core 2 mobile CPUs.

 

[alyarb]

+1 for bond quote, -1 because I can't get rid of my 939 systems, they keep working well despite being inefficient. Okay, I'll give you +2 for the bond quote

heh I have three X2 4400's and no boards. Don't want any either.

 

[Vesku]

Zap, those systems you linked START at around double the cost of a Zacate box. I'd personally get a ~$400ish laptops and run it headless before plunking down for those chic systems. Much better value proposition since it could always be used as a laptop again at anytime.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Naturally, buying zacate for price/performance doesn't make much sense. It's actually ridiculously expensive.

Why is your thread title, "Surprised (positively) about Zacate speed and price," then?

 

[velis]

LIFO:
@DominionSeraph: Because for 200&#8364; budget I was actually able to build a NEW computer. Already having HDD and RAM helped, but still...

@Everybody suggesting a notebook: The cheapest crap notebook over here is 300&#8364; and those are all atoms. The first E-350 is 360&#8364; and that one is still crap. Why would I buy a notebook just to get a MB with a really poor display attached?

@hoorah: I can't really complain over system responsiveness. Pretty much every time I have to wait, I wait for the disk. I suppose some windows readyboost flash would help a lot here, not to mention a proper SSD. However, after toying around with this baby I can't really say I can recommend it for HTPC use. It will skip frames while processing any interlaced material or any full HD material that can't be played through DXVA. It can however decode 720p in CPU with ~70&#37; CPU usage. Internet surfing is responsive and quick, no complaints there, but flash video is again limited to 720p. All being said and done, I'm much happier with my choice of i3 2105 for my own HTPC.

@arkaign: AII 250 is currently in my main rig. This is by no means a baseline processor. It can decode anything in software as far as video is concerned. The only thing it can't do in software is good deinterlacing. It also plays pretty much any modern game just fine. I would sooner recommend it as a high-end HTPC processor, but it eats a bit too much. The folks advertizing Sandy power draw are right: these really are the better deal.

@sm625: MarkLuvsCS is right. We have 20% VAT here (and it's by far not the highest in the EU). HW prices in EUR are at least what you have in USD, usually even a bit higher + there are no sweet deals like over at your place. Nor are the AT giveaways available to us I usually search for hardware through newegg because it has good filtering. After seeing those prices I get pretty pissed looking up the same HW over here because it's A LOT more expensive. This was even worse a short while ago when USD :EUR was 1,6:1.

Anyway, had some extra time today, so I went over to my uncle's. Compared to the Athlon 1800+@1,6GHz running WinXP (the old setup), E-350 running Win7 was way more responsive, even when I loaded it with like 5 file copies and multiple installs / configs.
Running MS Office Word / Excel 2010: 5 seconds first run after boot, 2-3 seconds after that. Outlook isn't worth mentioning, it just starts.
Starting up Firefox / IE: 2 - 5 seconds
Surfing the net: abysmal: uncle has a pathetic 1Mbit link (note that this does not relate to zacate performance, surfing was great on my 10Mbit connection)
Active --> sleep: 4 seconds
sleep --> Active: 3 seconds
The biggest gripe I have with it is that sometimes it scribbles around on the disk and trying to run an app results in waiting. Usually the waits are around 10 seconds and are common enough for me to notice and get pissed over it. I would most definitely not ever run this setup without a SSD.
I also don't think it was wise to spend 150&#8364; on the ASUS MB. I could've saved >40&#8364; by choosing a cheaper one (and it would still have similar feature set). Such a purchase would not present me with any additional woes. I could've invested the difference in more RAM which would help a bit with system responsiveness.

I agree with Zap that having a Zacate @ AII 250 performance would absolutely rock in terms of having the CPU fall-back option / power. As it is, this setup will serve my uncle just fine. It's responsive enough and any work that needs be done on it can be served with minimal waiting compared to standard desktop processors of today.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Zacate is really nice, if all you need is mild CPU usage, along with occasional 1080P video decoding. It's not a gaming CPU, nor is it a server CPU (although it could be used for a low-power fileserver).

I hope AMD does well with it. It's pretty cheap too, with the mobo and CPU combined. It's even overclockable, so I hear, although I have yet to try overclocking mine. Seems like a waste of power.

I don't think that I would do DC (Distributed Computing) on one though, that would kind of seem pointless. You could get much better output with a single-core SB CPU, I think.

 

[Cerb]

Had som problems mounting the disk: The monting holes are for 3,5" drives only, so the Scorpio is hanging off a single screw

Been there, done that. If you put some electrical tape or similar around the screw inside the cage, the drive will be very secure, even with just one screw (or, you could get a 2,5->3.5 adapter).

Youtube videos play without problems. 320p == 30% (@800MHz), 720p == 70% @ 1600MHz and 1080p is 80% with frame droping. Trying to figure out the problems.

Flash acceleration is screwy even with fast setups. Just one of those things. The bad bit is that there isn't the CPU power to use, instead.

The biggest gripe I have with it is that sometimes it scribbles around on the disk and trying to run an app results in waiting. Usually the waits are around 10 seconds and are common enough for me to notice and get pissed over it. I would most definitely not ever run this setup without a SSD.

While that's a fairly long wait time, I've found this to be common with Windows 7 when (a) running <4GB, and (b) having indexing and superfetch on. I can't say what exactly prevents it, except that I always disable indexing everywhere possible, have >= 4GB available for Windows to use, and disable superfetch, and it doesn't happen on those PCs.

I just found it to be way to anemic. it is silly in 2011 to have a cpu struggle at all with some flash and 1080p videos. just a regular Athlon X2 provides a WAY better daily user experience.

Somewhat agreed. I'm just waiting to get a call that just such a machine (4400+, 2GB RAM, now Win7 pro) needs to play videos, recommend a cheap video card, and then not hear anything more about it until at least 2015 . If you weren't gaming, the A64 X2s have managed some serious longevity. Even the later P4s, with more modern software, feel far more poky and bloated, IMO. In general, though, Zacate fills a niche: cheap and low power. For performance, you have to go elsewhere, and generally spend more money up front, or in electricity (most of the US need not worry about that, but other parts of the world do).

 

[hoorah]

heh I have three X2 4400's and no boards. Don't want any either.

Really? Where are you located? I wouldn't want to spend a bunch upgrading these old computers but a 4400 would be a nice upgrade for the 3200 currently running htpc2. I'd pay for shipping + a few dollars or maybe offer something in trade if you're interested.

 

[hoorah]

LIFO:

@hoorah: I can't really complain over system responsiveness. Pretty much every time I have to wait, I wait for the disk. I suppose some windows readyboost flash would help a lot here, not to mention a proper SSD. However, after toying around with this baby I can't really say I can recommend it for HTPC use. It will skip frames while processing any interlaced material or any full HD material that can't be played through DXVA. It can however decode 720p in CPU with ~70% CPU usage. Internet surfing is responsive and quick, no complaints there, but flash video is again limited to 720p. All being said and done, I'm much happier with my choice of i3 2105 for my own HTPC.
.

Interesting. Thats about the performance level I had with my X64 3200+ (stock speeds). It would do 720P MKVs at about 75-90% CPU usage, it would stutter on some 720P rarely and stutter on ALL 1080P. Tuned and played back digital captured TV just fine, so it worked out okay as a media center for a few years since we were only using a 720P TV. Added a $30 ATI 4530 card to do DXVA and was able to play back most 1080P with only 50% CPU.

Then, built a new desktop and scavenged the 4200+ chip (2.0ghz single core to 2.2ghz dual core, big improvement) for the HTPC and was able to play back 1080P in CPU only, but it really taxed the system. The dual core with DXVA was the sweet spot where it finally stopped feeling like the computer was struggling in day-to-day htpc use, so thats what I use as my benchmark to beat for a new HTPC system.