XFX

Oddly enough, XFX makes the video card that I've been having such a miserable time with too. I suspect that Blu-ray needs a lot more hardware than you'd think, looking at the price of Blu-ray players. If Blu-ray doesn't get cheaper in the next year or so, I have a suspicion that it will get leap-frogged by the next generation, just like laser disc did. Stay too expensive too long, and if the next gen comes out and start price dropping quick, you became an "also ran".

J.Ja

Blu-ray's biggest enemy is Video on demand

Blu-ray's biggest enemy is Video on demand. Even though the quality of streaming video is often lower than DVD, much lower than over-the-air free HD, and MUCH lower than Blu-ray, it has the advantage of being ON DEMAND. People will generally trade convenience for quality.

George Ou

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

Hey, George, this is a very late Happy 4th of July wish, to you and yours, and to all of the readers out there... wish it could have been better for you, I see you wrote your "Blu-ray PC blues" post on the 4th... NVidia is having all kinds of problems right now, and this may directly affect your situation, as I see it is an Nvidia-graphics based XFX motherboard... see some of the links on this Google search page...> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=nvidia+chip+failures <... maybe the Nvidia graphics chip is the problem and not the XFX boards... be interesting to see where this Nvidia situation goes... Nvidia has all of the pressure to keep up with/keep ahead of ATI/AMD, and you know they get pressure from all of the graphics board makers, like XFX, for whom they supply graphics chips... if Sony can survive a major hardware/software disaster, I would think Nvidia should be able too... anyway, have a great one, George, keep up the great work, and thanks for all of your great efforts on our behalf...

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

Sorry, gentleman, I do not know why my dissertation above posted twice... no one should have to read my stuff more than once, that's for sure... hey, George, maybe the problems with video drivers in Justin's post about same are Nvidia-derived also...

I don't know if all the problems are due to NVIDIA

I don't know if all the problems are due to NVIDIA. The S3 sleep problem might be an XFX issue or it may be NVIDIA. I would need to get another NVIDIA 7150 chipset motherboard from a different motherboard maker to test or if a reader can post their experiences, that would be great.

As for Blu-ray playback problems, I'm just surprised that it was so bad for such a modern chipset. Intel's G35 lets the CPU do all the work but at least it does work. Granted, the 7150 is a much cheaper solution and it might be better to pair the 7150-based board with a good $30 to $70 video card. However, I can't recommend the 7150 chipset until I can get confirmation that there are no S3 sleep/wake problems. Unfortunately, NVDIA has not been very helpful in answering any of my queries. I'm going to check with my old colleague Adrian at ZDNet who writes the hardware blogs and see what his experiences are.

George Ou

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

One of my PC-based Blu-Ray players uses an Nvidia 8400, and the other an ATI 2400. But work great with a fairly crappy dual-core AMD 3800+ and Asus motherboard. The video card is the bottleneck, the same CPU didn't work wth a crap with an Nvidia 6150.

Yeah, that's why I'm looking at the $30 ATI 3450 video card

Yeah, that's why I'm looking at the $30 ATI 3450 video card. It's a generation newer than the 2400.

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

That ought to work, it looks like a cost-reduced 2400.

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

George,
Check out this chipset, 780g. It has been getting great reviews and it has Blu-ray decoding right in the chipset. It also is one of the lowest power consumption boards Tomshardware has reviewed. They got fine Blu-ray playback with a Sempron 3200+. Couple this chipset with a 300watt 80+ and AMD 4050e, Blu-ray drive and you have a cheap, low power HTPC, with Blu-ray.

One other thing. I have read that in the full retail versions of the Blu-ray software there is a setting to enable hardware decoding of Blu-ray (if available on chipset/graphics). The OEM version of PowerDVD does not have this setting and thus the high CPU usage. I have not bought a Blu-ray player yet to test that.

Tom, that's basically an integrated ATI graphics chip

Tom, that's basically an integrated ATI graphics chip on the 780g board. The chipset is good, but I'm not impressed by the AMD CPUs. The cheap Intel Allendale I have goes all the way up to 2.93 GHz on stock voltage while remaining perfectly stable. Even for an HTPC system, I like something with a little more power in the CPU if I can help it.

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

No doubt Intel has higher-performance parts, but AMD is a lot cheaper. So if you're going for rock-bottom price and reasonable performance, they're hard to beat. For $200, you get an AMD quad core at 2.5 Ghz, and the comparable Intel part is $275. It's not completely fair, as Intel does more per GHz, but AMD has to lower prices to make the sale and that benefits the rock-bottom system builder.

Richard, my $70 dual-core Intel Allendale E2180 runs 2.93 GHz

Richard, my $70 dual-core Intel Allendale E2180 runs 2.93 GHz at stock voltage and the whole system idles at 42 watts. That absolutely annihilates any AMD quad-core for most applications especially when they're only optimized for one or two threads.

Intel’s sub-$200 older-generation Q6600 2.4 GHz 65nm quad-core still runs head to head with AMD’s 2.5 GHz quad-core at less cost and much less power consumption. I don’t see how you can justify any Phenom processor because of the price, performance, and lower-power consumption advantage of Intel’s last-generation parts.

AMD’s so-called “energy efficient” 65W TDP power quad-core 2.0 GHz 9350e consumes even more power than Intel’s last-generation 95W TDP Q6600 2.4 GHz system. Here’s a benchmark that compares the power consumption. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/amd-9350-phenom.ars/2

A system with an AMD 65W TDP CPU consumes more power than a system with an Intel 95W TDP 65nm CPU and even more power than a system with an Intel 130W TDP 45nm CPU. So it’s clear that AMD is misleading the media and the public when they say that Intel CPUs consume more power than their TDPs suggest and that AMD’s ACP (Average Consumption Power) metric - which is lower than AMD’s TDP rating - is somehow similar to Intel’s TDP metric.

A lot of journalists and people hope that AMD will stay alive and be a competitor to Intel and I want that too. I’m just not willing to achieve that by propping up a weaker product before the public. What we need is a real competitor that competes on merits and not on marketing trickery.

George Ou

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

I can't say that I've ever paid much attention to CPU power efficiency, I'm more a fan of cycles/dollar.

A dual core 2.4 GHz AMD is half the price of a comparable Intel dual core, $56 to $114 at Mwave. The Intel would have to be a twice as fast to justify double the price in my book, and it's probably only about 25% faster.

In the long run, a more power-efficient CPU will save you some money on your electric bill, but how long does it take for a 20w savings to add up to real money?

Richard, you should care more about performance per dollar, not cycles per dollar

Richard, you should care more about performance per dollar, not cycles per dollar. You cannot compare just the clock speeds. The Intel Allendale E2180 2.0 GHz at $70 and at stock speeds performs faster than the 2.4 GHz AMD dual-core. That same 2.0 GHz Allendale can be cranked to 2.93 GHz reliably at stock voltage which makes it even faster than any AMD quad-core on single- and dual-threaded applications. Very few applications on the desktop scale well to 4 threads.

George Ou

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

I looked up CPU benchmarks at Tom's Hardware, and here's what I found for a couple of different price/performance points with a couple of different benchmarks:

Intel 6300 $159 vs. AMD 4600 $129, same performance.
Intel 2160 $73 vs. AMD 4400 $60, same performance.

So the point stands, AMD offers better price/performance than Intel. You can save power with Intel, and you can get to a higher performance level, but you don't save money with Intel.

Incidentally, a watt of power will cost you about dollar a year, so power savings over a year or two is a legitimate thing to factor, I suppose.

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

Turns out my prices are wrong, the difference is actually much greater: AMD 4600 is < $60, Intel E6300 is $160, robbery. The E2160 is also about $60, but it's a closeout since it's an obsolete part.

E2160 is not a "close out"

First of all, the E2160 is not a "close out"; it's faster than any of the AMD dual-core processors when you take it to its full potential. The E6300 isn't a good deal and I never recommended that model. The E2160 can be cranked to 28 GHz with no modification to voltages while the AMD chips barely clocks anywhere even with higher voltages. There's a good reason the Intel chips get more money and that's because they're in higher demand by the consumer. Also, I submit that these minor price difference must be compared to the overall cost of the system you're building and not just the cost of the chip itself since chips don't run themselves.

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

The E2xxx family is the so-called "Dual Core Pentium", an older design that has inferior specs to the Core 2 Duo models that are the current generation. They have 800 MHz bus speed and only 1 MB of L2 cache. The modern Core 2 Duo designs have bus speeds up to 1333 MHz and up to 6 MB L2 cache.

I would submit that the newer Intel CPUs get a higher price because they're capable of higher system performance, but that never was the point. When you compare apples to apples, you can build a system cheaper using an AMD CPU, so for anything but a very high-end application, they're fine.

It's clever to take a cheap, older CPU and overclock the hell out of it as a means of boosting price/performance, I'll grant you. Overclocking generally works quite well for a while, but of you don't have superb cooling you'll get metal migration on the die and smoking parts eventually as the parts can't take the stress. I've never been a fan of over-clocking because I want to spend my time using my computer rather than tweaking it, but whatever floats your boat.

Richard, it is NOT an inferior design, it's identical to the high-end 65nm chips and it's clocked down

Richard, it is NOT an inferior design, it's identical to the high-end 65nm chips and it's clocked down. Sure, half the L2 cache is disabled but it doesn't really hurt the performance.

The FSB is deliberately clocked down to 200 MHz (double pumped and dual channel is 800 MHz) but I crank it to 333 MHz which gives me FSB 1333 and CPU jumps to 3.33 GHz. I don't even have to have any kind of exotic cooling or voltage jumps to achieve this kind of speed and it blows any of the AMD dual cores away.

George Ou

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

You need some kind of trick motherboard to do all that over-clocking, right? And it costs more than some other MBs you could use? So you pay for the performance one way or another.

No, the cheap mobos do it

No, any non-Intel motherboard lets you do it so long as it's not bottom of the heap cheap. We're looking at $70 range.

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

That is a cheap system then. What remains to be seen is how well it actually performs for the video task when over-clocked, as benchmarks can be deceiving, and how well it holds up over time.

Have you got it to play Blu-Ray yet?

It works as well as a high-end Intel dual-core

It works as well as a high-end Intel dual-core. Since we're not stressing the voltage, it holds up just fine. Even when you do stress the voltage, the chip will be obsolete long before you wear it out.

Re: Blu-ray PC blues

Richard, do you work for AMD?