BF2S Forums Building a HTPC PVR

One thing about the i3's is that they don't do Turbo Boost. While they're cheap if you plan on doing any video encoding or transcoding on your PVR then you'll want a hefty chip under the hood. Of course if you really want you can copy files to a more powerful computer on your network (even setting up automated processes to do so) that can handle the processor-intensive tasks and just use the PVR for recording and/or viewing duties. But if you can get a reasonably-priced i5 I'd suggest it's worth the money. EDIT: Looks like for $50 more you net an i5-2400 on Newegg that works with your motherboard. You could probably go with a less expensive motherboard to help make up the cost difference.

You'll also want a hefty processor if you're doing Blu-Ray decoding, especially if you want to go 1080p. A good video device will help with that but a big processor is important there. It's also needed if you want to watch any HD Flash content (i.e. Hulu or the like). In my opinion if you're making a setup like this you really should make serious HD capability a goal.

Oh, and might I also suggest a hardware audio solution in the name of performance (i.e. less drain on your CPU than a more software-based onboard sound system). You can get X-FI cards fairly cheap these days and you don't need a fancy-pants one for some good audio output.

Last edited by JdeFalconr (2011-06-04 20:38:26)

From a decoding perspecive, you really don't need all that much CPU muscle. Anything plays well on my HTPC - a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo with GPU offloading to a nvidia 320M. Now how much performance is needed to record with those cards I have no idea. If there going to be any transcoding then get all the performance you can get. Apparentely intels quick sync is fast and efficient. You may want to look into that.