Just a little success story here, I sourced a cheap Dell for a client
(seriously good deal IMO, £291 for a Vostro 400 w/ 2.4Ghz Allendale,
3GB of ram, Terabyte of disk, wireless, Vista Home Premium, set of
speakers with a sub, a wireless router, a surge protected plugboard.)
and dropped a 3870 into it, as it's going to be used in a sort of
media center'ish sort of way plugged into a 32" high def TV
Installed the CCCP codec pack (unchecking use ffmpeg for x264),
installed PowerDVD 8, turned on hardware acceleration within
PowerDVD... fired up a 7GB/hr h264 video (It's the Top Gear Polar
Special in 1080P), which historically completely slaughters machines,
VLC on the 4Ghz Wolfdale sits at 67% cpu utilisation with it (which
means a 2.4Ghz chip with 1/3rd the cache has no chance in hell of
playing it smoothly)
on the 2.4Ghz Allendale...
13% cpu utilization
THIRTEEN PERCENT, good grief, that's probably just the storm of
interrupts from shuffling the data over the network and to the GPU, wow.
the ease at which this was accomplished is making a Sempron or low end
A64 X2 on a 780G (which has the same video decoder core of course)
really really tempting for a media center box.... to replace the
makeshift E6600/i680/7800GT box I've got performing those duties now
(with CoreAVC on decoding duty, which is much faster for h264 decode
than VLC just for the record.)
I'm mainly amazed at how easy it was to get it to work :)
So, yeah, groooooooovy :)
-JB
