T processor for HTPC

[Maiyr]

Does it make sense to use one of the lower TDP processors for an always on HTPC, like the Intel Core i5-4460T, or is that a bad idea for reasons I may not fully understand. My thinking is less heat, smaller, quieter fan/heatsink = less noise in my living room.

Thanks,

Maiyr

 

[Charlie98]

Doesn't make sense. Remember, a CPU only uses enough power to handle the task at hand... be that a Celeron or an i7. At idle or normal streaming use, it hardly uses any CPU muscle at all and, therefor, very little power.

Just FYI, unless you are encoding or something else... that i5 is absurd overkill. A simple 2-core Pentium or Celeron will do for normal HTPC use.

 

[tential]

Doesn't make sense. Remember, a CPU only uses enough power to handle the task at hand... be that a Celeron or an i7. At idle or normal streaming use, it hardly uses any CPU muscle at all and, therefor, very little power.

Just FYI, unless you are encoding or something else... that i5 is absurd overkill. A simple 2-core Pentium or Celeron will do for normal HTPC use.

I'm not familiar with the lowend processors for HTPC use as I'd like to be but don't certain ones have more EUs which are better for certain scalers?
Edit: This is nitpicky though, generally, if you're using something that needs a faster GPU you already know that. Like Charlie said, you most likely should be using a far cheaper CPU. I could use a J1900 Baytrail for the majority of my HTPC usage.

 

[smitbret]

Does it make sense to use one of the lower TDP processors for an always on HTPC, like the Intel Core i5-4460T, or is that a bad idea for reasons I may not fully understand. My thinking is less heat, smaller, quieter fan/heatsink = less noise in my living room.

Thanks,

Maiyr

Your thinking is mostly correct, an i5 is total overkill. I like i3 for low power HTPC. A dual-core Celeron is more than adequate, too. You really don't even need that much, but it is good to have a little extra CPU HP in case you need to software decode some HD media for some reason.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I'm not familiar with the lowend processors for HTPC use as I'd like to be but don't certain ones have more EUs which are better for certain scalers?

If you care enough about the scaling to pick one Intel GPU over another, then you are probably picky enough to not use a Intel GPU at all lol. In all truth most of the decoding/scaling/deinterlacing on an Intel box should be done on the CPU, it is just so much more robust that way than on Intel's GPUs. That is the point, lowend Haswell celeron tech in 2014 can not only decode the worst 1080p, it can also scale or post-process like a champ.

 

[Charlie98]

I'm not familiar with the lowend processors for HTPC use as I'd like to be but don't certain ones have more EUs which are better for certain scalers?
Edit: This is nitpicky though, generally, if you're using something that needs a faster GPU you already know that. Like Charlie said, you most likely should be using a far cheaper CPU. I could use a J1900 Baytrail for the majority of my HTPC usage.

Your thinking is mostly correct, an i5 is total overkill. I like i3 for low power HTPC. A dual-core Celeron is more than adequate, too. You really don't even need that much, but it is good to have a little extra CPU HP in case you need to software decode some HD media for some reason.

That's why I always ask if they are going to encode video or something... I tried it on my G620 as an experiment... and the results were abysmal; if you plan to encode on a regular basis, that's i3/i5 territory.

Ivy and up Celerons are perfectly adequate for normal HTPC use (Sandy doesn't properly handle 23.976fps without a GPU,) I like a little insurance so I use Pentiums.

 

[DesiPower]

I have two PCs with celeron processors, one SB and IB, both connected to Big screen TVs, both have discrete low power GPU, my main PC runs Plex and WMC etc and has i5 CPU. Till now I have not experienced any slowness or other performance issues, IMO Celeren has enough juice for HTPC. I even ran the IB celeron on IGP for a while and didn't really see any issues expect when I would play a uncompressed BRD MKV locally. That too maybe because PC has only 2GB or Ram (WinXP). Once I added a GT620 to it, everything seemed to work just fine.

 

[evident]

Celeron G1610 works perfectly fine for HTPC, even using intel's integrated video. watching local media and streaming live tv via wmc seem good. for me only slowdown is the 6 year old hard drive it's running on.