Minimum requirements, upgrade?

[McBainUK]

What is considered to be the minimum requirements for GB-PVR and the pvrx2.exe UI?

I've been thinking of upgrades latley and after trying GB-PVR on many machines due to plugin/skin dev work I've realised that my actual HTPC is probably the worst of them all .

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1500+ (1.36GHz)
Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce FX5700 128MB (AGP)
Sound: Integrated 5.1
RAM: 1GB generic
(for full specs see link in sig)

Renderer: VMR9 FSE
Video decoder: ffdshow Video Decoder
Audio decoder: AC3Filter

Which one of the hardware specs do you guys think is the bottle neck here? Or is it all of it?

Would also be interested in hearing comments from people with similar specs and their experiences with GB-PVR menu performance aswel as video playback quality/reliability.

[johnsonx42]

When I first starting testing GB-PVR last year, I used 1.2.13 on the following machine:

Athlon64 2.5Ghz (single core)
384MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9500Pro (AGP)

It ran pretty well, in fact I got better video performance than I've ever gotten on my 'real' gb-pvr box, despite trying a series of far more powerful video cards (GeForce 7600gs, Radeon HD4550, GeForce 8400gs, GeForce 9400gt).

Your CPU is the only place your box falls far short of my test rig. That AthlonXP is old-n-slow by any standard.

[psycik]

I run an amd 3600 dual core and 8600gt video card. While is probably isn't the minimum, its pretty close to the minimum you can get away with 1080p decoding with no problems.

So if thats where your interest lies.... Of course finding low end am2 parts might be getting a bit difficult now.

[McBainUK]

Just SD sources here for now. So is there anyone else running GB-PVR on similar hardware?

[Fatman_do]

I run SD only on my hardware in my sig.

[imagn]

I have a second machine to the one listed in my sig that is almost the same as yours except i have 2.0gh AMD athlon and 2 gigs of ram, I only run SD cable on it and it works great, its been a long time since i looked at the specs so my Video card is either fx5200 or fx5700 AGP 4X either way it runs pretty well,

I did notice a while back some improvements when going from 1-2gig ram but i wasnt using GBPVR at the time

[HarryH3]

Recording on 3 tuners and viewing on 2 MVP's without an issue on the system in my sig. No HD stuff at all though.

[McBainUK]

I run an amd 3600 dual core and 8600gt video card. While is probably isn't the minimum, its pretty close to the minimum you can get away with 1080p decoding with no problems.

So if thats where your interest lies.... Of course finding low end am2 parts might be getting a bit difficult now.

So would a AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e but ok for HD playback (paired with a suitable g.card of course)? Seems to be a 2.6GHz, a 3600 is actually a 1.8Ghz right? AMD CPU names are so :confused:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/AMD-Athlo...che-Retail

[Deusxmachina]

My stock e2140 Core2Duo at 1.6ghz had no problem with 1080, but sometimes it was up around 80% on some files, although that may have been with a sharpening filter on in FFdshow, too. Of course, that overclocked to 2.8ghz without effort anyway.

I wouldn't bother going slower than a stock e2140 or whatever the AMD equivalent is. If you're at or above that, should be good. I'm not even sure if it's easy to buy something that slow nowadays anymore without it being used.

Main thing is, if you get something too slow, you will just kick yourself for as long as you have it. Something as (now) lowly as the e2140, I expect to work fine for my HTPC HD needs until it dies, even if I had left it at stock. I don't recall transcoding much while also playing 1080 at the same time, so if that's a factor, may even want to set your sights higher.

[johnsonx42]

So would a AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e but ok for HD playback (paired with a suitable g.card of course)? Seems to be a 2.6GHz, a 3600 is actually a 1.8Ghz right? AMD CPU names are so :confused:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/AMD-Athlo...che-Retail

I had a 4800 (2.5ghz dual core), it did HD playback just fine... I now have a 3800 (2.0ghz dual core), it also does just fine.

AMD's X2 CPU names are easy once you know the formula.. it's all the new Phenom/Phenom II names that make zero sense. To get the model number, you take the clock speed in megahertz, double it (two cores), and then subtract 200 if it doesn't have 1MB cache per core. Add an 'e' if it's a low power model, add 50 if there's been some core or functionality change.

So, the 5050e is 2600mhzx2=5200 less 200 for the small cache, +50 for a change (I don't know what it is, they use the same brisbane core as most other X2's), +e for being (comparatively) low power.

I believe the 3600 was usually a 1.9Ghz with 512k cache (per-core), though I think there were a few that were 1.8ghz with 1Mb cache. The same is true of the 4800; the original 4800's were 2.4ghz/1Mb (windsor core), but the modern ones are all 2.5ghz/512k (brisbane core).