Surprised (positively) about Zacate speed and price

[VirtualLarry]

I have a 2.3GHz BE-2400 in my HTPC, and under XP, even when overclocking that CPU to 2.85Ghz, I couldn't play back 1080P smoothly. I was finally able to get DXVA acceleration to work under Windows 7, when I upgraded. Then I was able to un-overclock the CPU, and still get decent (pretty-much perfect) 1080P playback performance.

 

[CTho9305]

You can set the BIOS to 1333 but the CPU only supports 1066 AFAIK. The E-450 comes out any day now and will support 1333. In fact it's been out for mobile platforms for a month now...

I'm pretty sure I've seen benchmarks showing scaling with the DDR speed, so I'd assume that overriding it to 1333 works.

I really like my Zacate rig. Unfortunately, it's been bluescreening occasionally with "STOP 0x124" errors. Unsure why. Possibly the PSU in the Rosewill ITX case is weak or something, don't really know.

Drivers/BIOS/Windows all up to date? I can't count the number of BIOS updates HP has done on this thing!

Most of your issues are probably PEBKAC. There's a ThinkPad X120e with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 in our house. With new drivers for everything and most of the bloatware (doesn't come with much) uninstalled it can play 1080p .mkv video files just fine. CPU usage remains relatively steady at 25-30%. It's far from struggling.

For Flash (YouTube) in 1080p with the latest version of the player and drivers, usage depends on what is being watched but it's almost always at 50-60%.

Also, an Athlon II X2 is pretty crap now. The Celeron Dual-Core is significantly faster and consumes less power, and Zacate consumes less power than both.

I'm typing this on a Zacate-based system and I can tell you that there absolutely are cases where it's slow: I notice it when I have multiple flash-ad-heavy tabs open. 1080p flash video is also pretty finicky... sometimes alt-tabbing out and back in, or unfullscreening and re-fullscreening results in choppy video. But it does work well enough that I would seriously consider using it for an HTPC if not for the fact that I also play StarCraft 2.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Drivers/BIOS/Windows all up to date? I can't count the number of BIOS updates HP has done on this thing!

Thanks, that's a good idea. I just updated the BIOS to 1.4.

 

[Spikesoldier]

zacate is a great value. it makes a capable htpc or basic use desktop, or as VL stated a low power fileserver.

 

[86waterpumper]

To me, a htpc should be able to do alot more than what a zacate will do. It should be able to multitask while movies are playing, it should be able to play ALL file formats and types of 1080p without software tweaks or hacks, and it should be ready to do at least light encoding work and even play some games. It should also handle tv tuners (alot of these rely heavily on the cpu to do the mpeg decoding etc.) It should be able to stream and record one show on a tuner for instance while you stream netflix in another window. There is no way a zacate could do this.

After all, if you don't want all these things you are probably better served with something like a roku or such device. These days with tvs, ps3s, nintendos and blu ray players and everything already doing netflix, hulu etc a htpc needs to be more capable to be worth the price it costs. To me the zacates and atoms make more sense for someone that just wants to check email and surf a few sites basically someone that could get by with something like a tablet but needs more storage space. Yes the atom and zacate systems can be built cheaper than other computers but you are still going to lay out a few hundred bucks to build a htpc with one. What is another 25 or 50 bucks to have a capable board/cpu on it? a amd x2 that is undervolted or a i3 uses very little power at idle also.

 

[pauldun170]

To me, a htpc should be able to do alot more than what a zacate will do. It should be able to multitask while movies are playing, it should be able to play ALL file formats and types of 1080p without software tweaks or hacks, and it should be ready to do at least light encoding work and even play some games. It should also handle tv tuners (alot of these rely heavily on the cpu to do the mpeg decoding etc.) It should be able to stream and record one show on a tuner for instance while you stream netflix in another window. There is no way a zacate could do this.

After all, if you don't want all these things you are probably better served with something like a roku or such device. These days with tvs, ps3s, nintendos and blu ray players and everything already doing netflix, hulu etc a htpc needs to be more capable to be worth the price it costs. To me the zacates and atoms make more sense for someone that just wants to check email and surf a few sites basically someone that could get by with something like a tablet but needs more storage space. Yes the atom and zacate systems can be built cheaper than other computers but you are still going to lay out a few hundred bucks to build a htpc with one. What is another 25 or 50 bucks to have a capable board/cpu on it? a amd x2 that is undervolted or a i3 uses very little power at idle also.

this

 

[deimos3428]

It should be able to stream and record one show on a tuner for instance while you stream netflix in another window. There is no way a zacate could do this..

I can't comment on Netflix, but my E-350 system can easily record two ATSC HD streams simultaneously (or watch one and record another.)

The HVR-2250 tuner's built-in MPEG-2 hardware encoder does all the heavy lifting for the encoding and the Extender (Xbox360) handles the decoding. The E-350 only has to deal with I/O, which it manages just fine.

 

[86waterpumper]

Well I'm sure it does...because...

The HVR-2250 tuner's built-in MPEG-2 hardware encoder does all the heavy lifting

This is what I'm talking about. Not all tuners do alot of heavy lifting. Tuners are always a tradeoff. Some have nice hardware onboard but work like crap because of design, and others vice versa. Some tuners have no onboard hardware decoding but yet have better signal reception etc. It is great if you happen to have a tuner that does have alot of horsepower, but if you don't like me, then it's just another cost you would have to add that makes the e-350 less appealing of a option. That tuner you've got also costs 100 dollars or better. As I said, a good htpc does not have to have everything tuned perfectly to work. Also, streaming atsc is far less taxing than either netflix or youtube 1080p. There have been plenty times I have wanted to do something in the background while my kids wanted to watch netflix. I'm not talking about using extenders and such either obviously that would help. Anyway there is no way on earth a dual core atom or e-350 either one could do what I am talking about smoothly. I love the idea of a all in one solution such as the e-350 is, but the e-450 that is out in the notebooks is still a weak chip. These are going to have to receive either a big ipc improvement, or a clockspeed of over 2ghz before they are going to be viable for most tasks. I'm sure for a simple fileserver they are great.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just hate to see people say "the e-350 makes a great htpc" because really it doesn't. I would hate for someone to spend their money on a system such as this, and expect it to do alot more than it's going to do that's all. As you can see from this very thread, the system in question that the op has cannot handle 1080p streams, and that's with it not even trying to do anything else.

 

[Zap]

I just hate to see people say "the e-350 makes a great htpc" because really it doesn't.

It all depends on what the person wants, needs and expects. It is obvious from various posts that it DOES make for a great HTPC... at least for some. It is obvious that one size does NOT fit all. That is to say, an E-350 is not ALWAYS the best HTPC choice, just as something with more performance is not ALWAYS the best HTPC choice.

 

[86waterpumper]

Huh? Oh well I guess I have missed those threads. Like you say though it is all matter of opinion. I see you posting about how meager the bandwidth on the video is yourself though in this thread haha
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2168170

here is another one where you reccomend that someone go with a i3 2100 instead of the e-350! The usages that person says they are going to do are if anything much less than what a typical htpc would be doing. No blu-ray, no encoding, etc
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2179502

When I search I see other threads with people having 1080p playback stuttering and other speed related lags or issues. For instance here are a couple.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2174663
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2186157

Then we have THIS very thread where the op talks of 1080p issues and lagging while running apps also
Now then, show me all the other threads where people are using a e-350 for a htpc and in love with it and having no issues?

 

[Binky]

Modern low-wattage CPUS are great unless you really want things to ALWAYS go smoothly (e.g. all 1080p video). If perfect playback is more important than efficiency, then maybe you shouldn't also to be on the cutting edge of energy efficiency.

My current HTPC can do 4xHD recording and 1x HD playback, but it probably draws a lot more power than an E-350 (E8400, 8GB, 7200rpm).

 

[omek]

I've got a dual core Atom 1.6GHz system with Ion (9300 nVidia) and the CPU usage is about the same. No stuttering. Zecate is much faster than the Ion DC, the selling point is the discrete GPU and Flash 10.1 and beyond which uses the GPU. Otherwise the Atom would choke, hard.

 

[velis]

Huh? Oh well I guess I have missed those threads. Like you say though it is all matter of opinion. I see you posting about how meager the bandwidth on the video is yourself though in this thread haha
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2168170

here is another one where you reccomend that someone go with a i3 2100 instead of the e-350! The usages that person says they are going to do are if anything much less than what a typical htpc would be doing. No blu-ray, no encoding, etc
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2179502

When I search I see other threads with people having 1080p playback stuttering and other speed related lags or issues. For instance here are a couple.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2174663
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2186157

Then we have THIS very thread where the op talks of 1080p issues and lagging while running apps also
Now then, show me all the other threads where people are using a e-350 for a htpc and in love with it and having no issues?

You're starting to really push it with all this hate. I said it can't do flash 1080, but I also said it handles MKVs just fine. And those are my direct BD rips ~20GB in size each. It also does 720p in CPU (I'm talking MPEG4 and AVC here).

This CPU can be used for some pretty awesome movie watching, you just have to be careful what you feed it. For anyone that manages his own BD rips it is very usable as a HTPC CPU but I already said that that's not the case for me since I need deinterlacing and other tasks my own HTPC has to do.

It also does web surfing just fine and office productivity just fine. Of course it's not stellar, but it ultimately does the job. Not for me, not for you, but for a lot of other people that aren't as demanding as we are.

Now, can you add anything constructive to the thread and not just how other processors are simply better for the money and how this particular one sucks?

 

[Meaker10]

For about £180 ($280) I got my wife the following:

A8-3850
8GB DDR3 1600mhz Gskill
Asrock A75M-HVS (SATA3, USB3)
(plus a free copy of dirt3)

Has massively sped up her audio and video work from her old celeron (dual core, core 2 based), the extra ram helps too.