BMS Posted September 7, 2003 Posted September 7, 2003 I am about to build a new PC and I'm most likely going to be moving down the Path of a HDTV Card. What sort of PC specs am I looking at? ie CPU, Ram etc Thanks Paul
HoffY Posted September 7, 2003 Posted September 7, 2003 Hi BMS, Well i guess the same rule applies when buying a new system. You want to get yourself the fastest components your money can buy. So really its limited to how much you want to spend and what you want to use it for. For HD. Well considering DxVA then it requirments arent really as high as most people seem to think. CPU: Pentium4 2.4C - AMD XP2600+. RAM: 512MB DDR RAM GFX: Any of the newish graphics cards wether they be the cheaper ones or the ones touching 1000$ for DxVA. Though cards like Ti4200's work etc. So i guess its just dependant on what you want and at what price. But you may as well buy the latest ones if you're going to buy, HD is just beginning remember. Other's may think this is over kill. i dont know. But IMO if i were to buy. These would be minimum spec.
joeybloggs Posted September 7, 2003 Posted September 7, 2003 I am about to build a new PC and I'm most likely going to be moving down the Path of a HDTV Card. What sort of PC specs am I looking at? ie CPU, Ram etcThanks Paul Whilst a 2.4 GHz / 500Mb / DxVA Video machine should be fine for viewing HD. Consider whether you will want to re encode HD to SD for burning onto DVD. Consider whether you will want to re encode HD to DivX / Mpeg4 / H.264 for VCD's etc Think about storage too, are you going to have a seperate disk for video recording ? Do you want to be able to capture lots of analog video ?
BMS Posted September 8, 2003 Author Posted September 8, 2003 I was thinking of around a 2.5+CPU (Depends on Price as I may need two machines) and possible 2 x 120GB HDs and yes I do intend on doing a lot of re-encoding and DVD Burning, but this will mainly be home movies, but then again it would nice to store TV episodes on DVD. Thanks Guys, You have given me a good starting point. Regards Paul
joeybloggs Posted September 8, 2003 Posted September 8, 2003 ASUS Introduces Powerful and Cost-Effective Motherboard with Dual-Xeon™ Architecture Taipei, Taiwan; Aug 22, 2003 – ASUSTeK Computer Inc. (ASUS), the worldwide leader of motherboards, today began shipments for the PC-DL Deluxe high-performance motherboard based on a dual-Intel® Xeon™ processor architecture. Delivering exhilarating performance and dependability, the PC-DL Deluxe is the world's first Intel 875P chipset-based motherboard to adopt a dual-processor design. Supporting Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology, it further provides extreme computing power comparable to that of four-processor solutions. In the past, DV capturing, video conversion processing and CAD/CAM applications normally took all night. With the PC-DL Deluxe, these complex tasks can now be completed in 1 to 2 hours. Its probably a little on the expensive side
BMS Posted September 8, 2003 Author Posted September 8, 2003 My current Board is an ASUS. Very good MBs. Then again I know Expensive MB means Expense CPU and so on That's what happened with my last PC Cheers Paul
TigerLeo62 Posted September 8, 2003 Posted September 8, 2003 I was thinking of around a 2.5+CPU (Depends on Price as I may need two machines) and possible 2 x 120GB HDs and yes I do intend on doing a lot of re-encoding and DVD Burning, but this will mainly be home movies, but then again it would nice to store TV episodes on DVD.Thanks Guys, You have given me a good starting point. Regards Paul I think the two HDs set in a RAID 0 formation will do the job of storing the HD content - this will possibly be more important than increasing your CPU speed... No point having a blazing fast CPU if you have bottle-necks thoughout the rest of your system IMHO. A 2.4 P4 800 MHz FSB with PC3200 RAM and with three drives (two set up as Serial ATA RAID) and a gig of ram will possibly set you back around $2K. This will give you access speed on your drives at half the drive's rated milliseconds - so about 4 to 5 ms in a RAID 0 configuration. I would doubt that the CPU will have problems handling the HD processing - you need the drives to be able to store the data - two 120 gig drives in RAID 0 equals 240 gig! And the RAID setup will certainly help with the encoding back to your third (primary) drive. Anyhow, that's the system I have ordered - but with two 80 gig Serial ATA drives for the RAID and one 40 gig drive as the primary drive - all drives with 8Mb cache. I intend to do a lot of Audio recording/sequencing and SD capture. My data rates will be high with multi-track uncompressed audio, so I would expect that around 13 Mbps for HD writing should be fine.
BMS Posted September 9, 2003 Author Posted September 9, 2003 Thanks for the info, I guess its now down to what I can afford. I would like one not too hot PC for the HT and a better one for me. Both need to be able to do HD. Cheers Paul
TigerLeo62 Posted September 9, 2003 Posted September 9, 2003 Thanks for the info, I guess its now down to what I can afford. I would like one not too hot PC for the HT and a better one for me. Both need to be able to do HD.Cheers Paul Yeah - a hot PC that doesn't run too loud - that will be a challenge for the HTPC... Most slim line cases do 1x 5.25 external and 1x 3.5 external and 1x 3.5 internal with half height (low profile) cards - so designing a HTPC for HD in this config will be really hard... You will probably need a mini-tower case to accomondate your HDs and cards with at least a 300 watt power supply - even with one fan it will probably run at 40dB. So, you will probably need to look at sound insulation/deadening material to reduce the dB levels... There are links on WEB for sound deadening for PCs - try http://www.dansdata.com for some links - I know I found some links off there for sound deadening/absorbtion... Either that or look at Jaycar for accoustic absorbing materials - as used in car audio and speaker matting materials... Unfortunately I have just replaced my PC and my saved favourites have been saved as spurious 8 character DOS names, so I can't give you the links I had saved before... I can't even type on this new keyboard without making constant typos that I need to correct!!
BMS Posted September 9, 2003 Author Posted September 9, 2003 Unfortunately I have just replaced my PC and my saved favourites have been saved as spurious 8 character DOS names, so I can't give you the links I had saved before...I can't even type on this new keyboard without making constant typos that I need to correct!! Yes I know what you mean. Not sure how much of an issue sound will be for me. My PC is going to be built into an Entertainment Unit which should help reduce the noise level, But I'm guessing I need to still get fresh air into the unit. I will post a picture of what I mean when I'm back home. Cheers Paul
Croc Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 raid setup will NOT make your access time faster as TigerLeo62 said but will give you faster transfer for read/write raid0 (short version) half file goes on one drive and other half on 2nd drive, on paper you could almost double your hdd speed becuase computer reads both half at the same time in real life is not double but is MUCH faster. access time does not change and if it does it actualy goes up and not down most the time so if you get 9ms with single drive in raid setup with 2 same drives it will be ~10ms.
BMS Posted September 10, 2003 Author Posted September 10, 2003 My only reason for the additional HD is purely because I don't want space issues. If speed is an added benefit the great I will start looking at Hardware this week who knows where this will all lead ?? Cheers Paul
Spoonfed Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 As in the other thread, my 2400 with 9600 pro and DxVA enabled does 9HD (and 1080 demos) with 20% cpu usage. SO is ample. I run 1 60gb Barracuda V (segate) as the boot drive for OS/Apps/Mp3's etc and 2 Barra 60g in Raid 0 for Timshifing, recording etc. The raid is about 30% faster in sequential read, about 50% slower in sequential write but about 80% faster in read/write combiniations (test done using Performance Test). The 2 raid drives working are quiter than 1 single too, strangely enough. I went the 60gb Barra V's as they are single paltter, much much quiter than the 80gb dual platter V in my Xbox.
joeybloggs Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 raid0 (short version) half file goes on one drive and other half on 2nd drive, on paper you could almost double your hdd speed becuase computer reads both half at the same time in real life is not double but is MUCH faster. This is assuming single file access. If you are trying to read one file and write to another you may be better off having a 'source' drive and a 'target drive'. That way the heads on each drive can stay where they are instead of thrashing back and forth between the two files.
TigerLeo62 Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 raid setup will NOT make your access time faster as TigerLeo62 said but will give you faster transfer for read/writeraid0 (short version) half file goes on one drive and other half on 2nd drive, on paper you could almost double your hdd speed becuase computer reads both half at the same time in real life is not double but is MUCH faster. access time does not change and if it does it actualy goes up and not down most the time so if you get 9ms with single drive in raid setup with 2 same drives it will be ~10ms. Yeah, sorry, Croc you are correct - I meant read/write but bunged it together as 'access' time which is incorrect - makes sense that the access time will be slower over two drives - but once accessed the read will be faster - and perhaps more importantly the wrtiing time will be much faster than a normal drive for storing the HD content... This is assuming single file access. If you are trying to read one file and write to another you may be better off having a 'source' drive and a 'target drive'. That way the heads on each drive can stay where they are instead of thrashing back and forth between the two files. I would hope that anyone with a RAID 0 set-up would have a primary drive seperate from their RAID drives, so transfering files from the RAID to the primary drive would not be an issue - however it would be an issue if you only had the RAID 0 set-up... But I guess if you are looking at a RAID 0 drive configuration then you would also be looking at keeping that seperate from you operating system and applications (on your primary drive) to take full benefit of the write speed/benefits - perhaps if you were using RAID 1 then a primary drive is not as critical.
longshot Posted September 10, 2003 Posted September 10, 2003 I wonder to what extent the video processing, encoding and decoding will wind up being performed by GPUs rather than CPUs. Nvidia's GPUs already have a high definition video processor which they call HDVP: http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_hdvp.html GPUs are approximately the same number of transistors as CPUs these days - the Pentium 4 and the Geforce 4 were both around 60 million. I think the FX5600 has double that. HDVP has been mentioned a couple of times in these forums, but no-one has really come back with much specific information about its use. For example, I wonder if mplayer and/or xine use the GPUs. My point is really that you it may be better to have a CPU+GPU view rather than 2XCPU+GPU view. Smaller boxes, cheaper, ....
joeybloggs Posted September 11, 2003 Posted September 11, 2003 HDVP has been mentioned a couple of times in these forums, but no-one has really comeback with much specific information about its use. For example, I wonder if mplayer and/or xine use the GPUs. My point is really that you it may be better to have a CPU+GPU view rather than 2XCPU+GPU view. Smaller boxes, cheaper, .... I'm wondering if Nvidia's HDVP which from what I can find seems to be Mpeg2 decode in silicon handles non US formats ??? Is this what is being wrapped by DxVA ? 3D acceleration and DSP are very different application spaces and i think that it is more likely that we will end up with dedicated DSP boards in our systems that can decode and encode to and from main memory rather than just video memory. This addresses many more scenarios than just decoding Mpeg2 on the video card. And when better compression algorithms are developed you just update the software rather than buying new hardware. Of course DSP's get more powerfull each year just like CPU's and GPU's Like this (pls note this is NOT HD) 4 Channel PCI MPEG4 AVC / H.264 Encoder
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