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Dave wrote: > Thanks to everyone for your wonderful knowledge (I don't know how you keep > up with it all!). I think it's called spending your life reading hardware sites. > I'm warming to a Dual Core (rather then Quad-Core) now and perhaps a single > memory chip (AMD back in the running here). I think the point about the > 'displayer' doing the hard work of uncompressing the Video was quite > interesting since that will be the individual Media Directors and this has > helped convince me that perhaps Quad-Core might be overkill. > I'd still suggest going down the dual channel route considering you get more memory bandwidth. Often you'll find it's cheaper to buy a kit of two DIMMs than it is to buy a single. This memory at £26 for 2x 1GB comes highly recommended... http://tinyurl.com/6rjy2c Geil memory can be overclocked so it is possible to push the CPU speed that slight bit higher. CPU wise, I would suggest the Pentium Dual Core E2160 - http://tinyurl.com/65buno I have one of these myself in my other half's PC. At standard they run at 1.8GHz and have 512K cache on each core (total 1MB). They will quite happily play 720p video without breaking out in a sweat, at least on Windows anyway. They can in some cases be overclocked to around 3GHz with a decent cooler. With the standard cheapo Intel cooler which you get in the box I have overclocked mine to 2.4GHz without any real increase in temperature (although the fan is noisier than I'd like, but not extreme). For a media centre PC you'd probably want to get a decent heatsink and fan and attach a fan controller to drop the speed down a bit (as I mentioned, the Zalman cooler does the job really well for about £40 - http://tinyurl.com/63f3au). From what I understand the Athlon X2 5000+ offers around the same sort of performance as the Pentium Dual Core E2160. Again check Tom's Hardware Guide for reviews on cooler. You'd surely be able to find a good one for about £15 to £20. Thinking about it, something like this Zalman one might fit better for a media centre case (http://tinyurl.com/54v5mw) which is about £30 (here's a review - http://www.silentpcreview.com/article761-page1.html). The great think about the Zalman coolers is that they come with fitting kits for both Intel and AMD processors so you can use the cases on both. If you go for AMD you should be able to in the future if required replace the CPU with a Phenom and if you go down the Intel route you should be able to fit a Core 2 Quad. > One other thing which is bugging me is I know SMP was mentioned but is that > independent of the Software or does software have to be aware of SMP to > utilise the multi-cores? - I'd hate to buy even 2 Cores and think one is sat > around all day twiddling it's thumbs because the software doesn't realise > there is spare capacity there. From experience I've found that when one core gets under load it seems to go over to the other core(s). What I'd love to find out though if I can specify what runs on what core. When playing video files, from what I can gather at the moment the decoding process doesn't span across multiple cores (which is really really annoying), but I would assume that multiple video transcoding tasks could run across multiple cores. From what I understand these can be scheduled to run overnight anyway (assuming you'll leave the machine on 24/7). > > And Grant you might be pleased to know this wealth of help and knowledge has > finally convinced me to make the jump to LINUX full time (keep hanging onto > those Windows Apron Strings at the moment) - What's the general favourite > for HW compat etc other then Kubuntu? (note my previous dabbles have left me > cold as regards Gnome but quite enamoured with KDE). > Maybe you might want to have a look at PCLinuxOS (I've heard pretty good things about it) or Mandriva? Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html