Intel® Core™ i3 530 & Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H Motherboard $104 + SH or $88 AR B&M @ Frys

 

The CPU is the Retails version with fan.

 

http://www.frys.com/product/6214500

Wow, that is a good deal!

 

Newegg lists the tech specs for that mobo.

 

Based on Newegg's price for the mobo, that's basically a free i3!

 

Keep in mind that the Gigabyte board may have HPA issues when used in the unRAID environment.  I'm tempted to pick up this combo for a desktop, though...

I brought this combo mainly for Unraid so I guess I will find out it has the HPA issues or not over the weekend.

I didn't get a chance to find out that board has HPA issue or not because the board is too tiny. The Gigabyte chip is blocking the PCI slot that my SAT2-MV8 won't fit.  bummer.

That is too bad.  Are you going to return it?  If you use it as a desktop, I'm curious as to whether the onboard graphics could handle 720p or 1080p video.

 

Edit:  Weak, I went to buy one, but it looks like they are out of stock now.  Guess I waited too long.

No, the combo is just too cheap to resist. A boxed i3 itself is $100 already. I am using it as my htpc with xbmc. This can do 1080p fine. I think there will be a shift from buying atom+ion to i3 setup for htpc. I can do slot more with i3 then atom.

I'm curious as to whether the onboard graphics could handle 720p or 1080p video.

 

 

There are information you can find from AVSForum, i think peoples are more focusing on audio instead of video

because it doesn't take much computing power to do 1080p video.

 

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1172451

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1241833

I'm curious as to whether the onboard graphics could handle 720p or 1080p video.

 

 

There are information you can find from AVSForum, i think peoples are more focusing on audio instead of video

because it doesn't take much computing power to do 1080p video.

 

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1172451

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1241833

 

Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.  As I understand it, 1080p is very CPU intensive if you don't have a good GPU that can handle the burden.  The new Nvidia ION GPUs are perfect for this.  I wasn't sure about the integrated graphics with the i3/5/7 CPUs.

I think I read some where that i3 GPU is like ATI 4xxx and Audio is ATI 5xxx but don't quote me on that.

The Clarkdale (i3-500/i5-600) GPU is roughly on par with ION/GeForce 9300 when it comes to performance. It does full hardware acceleration of MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1 (granted, I reckon even the i3-530 2.93GHz is fast enough not to need it). The only reason why people are focusing on audio bitstreaming is because it's a somewhat unique feature. Prior to the release of the ATI Radeon HD5000 series, the only way to get audio bitstreaming is by using an add-on sound card. Clarkdale is the first (and currently only) to include it on the IGP.

 

Quite frankly, though, few people have the necessary audio set-up to show the difference and probably fewer still have the keen hearing to notice it.

As I understand it, 1080p is very CPU intensive if you don't have a good GPU that can handle the burden.  The new Nvidia ION GPUs are perfect for this. 

 

I don't think to do 1080p video is CPU intensive especially if you refer to playback blu-ray movie with H.264/VC1 codec.

I tried it before without turn on hardware acceleration which mainly using CPU to do the work,no problem with my Intel E6550.

 

you don't need to have latest video card hardware either, My HTPC started with ATI 3450 and now ATI 4550 all could playback blu-ray without problem by using PowerDVD with hardware acceleration turn on (any tool will do as long as it support hardware acceleration to leverage on video card's computing power), in this case, CPU loading is low (less than 15% most of time during playback)

 

There is however some new audio format only latest video card like ATI 5xxxx will support if you plan to use HDMI interface and has receiver to decode it. When using Intel i3/i5 i think it is up to onbaord audio chip combined with i3/i5 to mux audio/video together

then output through HDMI (correct me if i am wrong since i don't plan to build a i3/i5 HTPC yet  )

I don't think to do 1080p video is CPU intensive especially if you refer to playback blu-ray movie with H.264/VC1 codec.

I tried it before without turn on hardware acceleration which mainly using CPU to do the work,no problem with my Intel E6550.

 

you don't need to have latest video card hardware either, My HTPC started with ATI 3450 and now ATI 4550 all could playback blu-ray without problem by using PowerDVD with hardware acceleration turn on (any tool will do as long as it support hardware acceleration to leverage on video card's computing power), in this case, CPU loading is low (less than 15% most of time during playback)

 

There is however some new audio format only latest video card like ATI 5xxxx will support if you plan to use HDMI interface and has receiver to decode it. When using Intel i3/i5 i think it is up to onbaord audio chip combined with i3/i5 to mux audio/video together

then output through HDMI (correct me if i am wrong since i don't plan to build a i3/i5 HTPC yet  )

 

An E6550, even running at 2.33GHz stock, is a far cry from the Atom. Besides, back in the days, the E6550 is considered fairly high end - mainstream at the least. 1080p video (talking about high bitrate Blu-ray 1:1 rips here) certainly wasn't something lower clocked processors such as the E2160 1.80GHz can handle. Trust me, I've tried (with CoreAVC, even).

 

Nowadays, we just take it for granted that a Celeron E3200 2.40GHz Wolfdale is able to decode 1080p Blu-ray rips.

 

HD audio bitstreaming is a bit of a special case. Your PC's processor can easily decode it and pass the audio to the receiver as LPCM. Purists just prefer their receivers to do the decoding.

An E6550, even running at 2.33GHz stock, is a far cry from the Atom. Besides, back in the days, the E6550 is considered fairly high end - mainstream at the least. 1080p video (talking about high bitrate Blu-ray 1:1 rips here) certainly wasn't something lower clocked processors such as the E2160 1.80GHz can handle. Trust me, I've tried (with CoreAVC, even).

 

Well, maybe it was because i started my HTPC with a Q6600, so i never consider E6550 is high-end. 

 

I planned to use HTPC to playback any sort of video codec and many of them can only be decoded through software solution, not to mention i also throw in some tunner cards for TV recording that need CPU to do the job. But in the end i learned dual-core is more than enough but not the dual-core in the spectrum of E2160 that with 800MHz FSB and small cache. Not to mention atom.

 

Atom is good in power consumption however whoever want to go for atom solution, better make sure somewhere down the road there is no need for more CPU power.

Ive been trying to get my hands on this combo. All the stores around here are sold out.  Im kicking myself that I missed this in the ad on Friday.  I have a new HTPC case just sitting here waiting for this board and processor.

I planned to use HTPC to playback any sort of video codec and many of them can only be decoded through software solution, not to mention i also throw in some tunner cards for TV recording that need CPU to do the job. But in the end i learned dual-core is more than enough but not the dual-core in the spectrum of E2160 that with 800MHz FSB and small cache. Not to mention atom.

 

CPU power isn't really necessary if recording from ATSC or clear QAM. Neither is it required if the tuner/capture card has a built-in hardware encoder. Besides, nowadays, real-time encoding of SD material isn't really a heavy load on the CPU. As for the not enough thing, the FSB and cache doesn't really matter. The clock rate does. 1.80GHz isn't enough for decoding HD but overclocking to 2.40GHz (easily doable on a good motherboard and decent cooling) should make it capable of Blu-ray playback even without hardware acceleration.

Im kicking myself that I missed this in the ad on Friday.  I have a new HTPC case just sitting here waiting for this board and processor.

 

Well, don't kick yourself too hard. 

As far as i can remember, this is 2nd time Fry's has this deal in months, i bet Fry's will run it again since this deal is very popular. just pay attention on Fry's weekly ad each friday.

CPU power isn't really necessary if recording from ATSC or clear QAM. Neither is it required if the tuner/capture card has a built-in hardware encoder. Besides, nowadays, real-time encoding of SD material isn't really a heavy load on the CPU. As for the not enough thing, the FSB and cache doesn't really matter. The clock rate does. 1.80GHz isn't enough for decoding HD but overclocking to 2.40GHz (easily doable on a good motherboard and decent cooling) should make it capable of Blu-ray playback even without hardware acceleration.

 

If we are only talking about 1 recording stream that might be true but i have 3 NTSC and 2 ATSC tuners in my HTPC and the max i will have 4 recording streams while i watch one at same time. has built-in MPEG2 encoder on tuner card does alleviate loading from CPU but this kind of tuner usually is more expensive than those has none. i would rather to have spare CPU power idle than run out of juice when demand kick in.

 

Before Intel move memory controller from north bridge into CPU (i3/i5 Clarkdale has it), FSB is important because CPU use it to communicate with memory controller, bigger cache "usually" bring in better performance assuming your application has very good "locality". You can see this combination by comparing some CPU from Intel, for example E6550 vs. E7200 vs. E6500. Cache occupies a lot of "real estate" on CPU chip.

 

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Motherboard_diagram.svg

http://i696.photobucket.com/albums/vv328/renethx_yahoo/SystemArchitecture-ClarkdaleDetails.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference

http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/images/1993_intel_pentium_large.jpg

 

 

Actually, I think you might be hitting hard drive limitations rather than CPU. Remember, you're doing random writes when recording multiple streams. One way of alleviating the problem is by using 64k allocation units.

 

I'm not saying FSB and cache aren't important. I'm just saying the clock rate has the most noticeable effect in this particular application.

Actually, I think you might be hitting hard drive limitations rather than CPU. Remember, you're doing random writes when recording multiple streams. One way of alleviating the problem is by using 64k allocation units.

 

That is true but after gave it a try, disk write still able to catchup although it is stressful and not surprise at about 1+ year of usage there are many "reallocation sector" count from this Seagate disk i have box. 

That is true but after gave it a try, disk write still able to catchup although it is stressful and not surprise at about 1+ year of usage there are many "reallocation sector" count from this Seagate disk i have box. 

 

Well, 3x SD streams + 2x HD streams isn't really all that difficult. I've got an ION build (ION/Atom 330) and even the 5400RPM Seagate Momentus laptop HDD can do 3x HD recordings + 1 timeshifted HD playback when formatted with 64k allocation units. Processor doesn't even get stressed.

 

Assuming the signals are already digital (e.g. from ATSC, QAM) or the tuner has a built-in hardware encoder, the bottleneck would probably be the strorage subsystem and not the CPU.

Well, I managed to get one of these on Wednesday.  Its freaking awesome!  My current HTPC is an HP Z557 (P4 3.0), so this is quite a step up.  Im actually able to do 30 second skip on a 1080p file without it messing up the audio sync.

 

I purchased an nMediaPC 5000 case with PRO-LCD display in it and Im a little underwhelmed.  The case seems a little flimsy and the display is horrible.  So, now Im on the search for a different case, or at least a different display.