Getting the Best out of an Ivy Bridge HTPC: Windows 8, madVR and More..

by Ganesh T S on January 20, 2013 3:00 PM EST

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Introduction

The build process and thermal performance of a fanless Ivy Bridge HTPC was covered in detail last month. I had indicated that the piece would be the first of a three-part HTPC series. Today, we are looking at the second part of the series. My original intention was to present the HTPC oriented benchmarks and aspects of the PC as it was built in the first part.

After a few experiments, we had to do some updates to the build in terms of both hardware and software (OS). The first hint of trouble came when I was unable to reproduce the performance of the i7-3770K Ivy Bridge HTPC with respect to madVR despite having DRAM running at 1600 MHz instead of 1333 MHz. The second was more of a decision to test out what Windows 8 offers to HTPC users. As you will see in later sections, Windows 8 offers a host of advantages to the HTPC user while also presenting some roadblocks.

In our initial build, we had avoided filling up the second DRAM slot because the DRAM heat sink ended up scraping against the capacitors in the Nano150 PSU. Unfortunately, this meant that we had halved the memory bandwidth available to the processor. madVR, in particular, is very sensitive to bandwidth constraints. We fixed this by deciding to allow the heat sink to touch the capacitors and ended up increasing the installed memory from 4 GB to 8 GB. In order to install Windows 8, we added another SSD to the system and set the unit up in a dual boot configuration with both Windows 7 and Windows 8. We were able to perform sensible power consumption comparisons between the two operating systems in this scenario (same hardware and software configuration except for the OS itself).

In the rest of the piece, we will be looking at the general performance metrics, network streaming performance (Netflix and YouTube), refresh rate handling, HTPC decoding and rendering benchmarks for various combinations of decoders and renderers and revisit the power consumption and thermal profile of the system. Before proceeding further, the table below summarizes the hardware and software configuration of the unit under consideration.

Ivy Bridge Passive HTPC Configuration
Processor	Intel Ivy Bridge Core i3-3225 (2 x 3.30 GHz, 22nm, 3MB L2, 55W)
Motherboard	Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe
Memory	2 x 4GB DDR3-1600 [ G-Skill Ares F3-2133C9Q-16GAB ]
Graphics	Intel HD Graphics 4000 650 MHz / 1.15 GHz (Turbo)
Disk Drive(s)	Corsair F120 120 GB SSD OCZ Vertex 2 128 GB SSD
Optical Drive	Blu-ray/DVDRW Combo (Philips Lite-On DL-4ETS)
Networking	Gigabit Ethernet 802.11b/g/n (5GHz/2.4GHz Dual-Band access) / Bluetooth 4.0 (2T2R Broadcom BCM43228 in AzureWave AW-NB111H)
Audio	Microphone and headphone/speaker jacks Capable of 5.1/7.1 digital output with HD audio bitstreaming (optical SPDIF/HDMI)
Operating Systems	Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Windows 8 Professional x64

General Performance Metrics

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guidryp - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
I tried MediaPortal and it's TV-Tuner recording is a MESS.

I had better luck getting MythTV working under Linux. Pulling EPG from the DVB info worked in MythTV, but never really got it working in MediaPortal. Not that it is all that useful for guide recording anyway.

So I still maintain there is no credible EPG-Tuner recording software to WMC. Reply
HighTech4US - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Agree, I see no other overall complete platform that would be better (or even equal) for a 4-OTA Tuner DVR with unlimited storage (only limited by disk size) with free EPG that Windows 7 Media Center provides.

And by tricking out 7MC with MediaBrowser, MediaControl, SHARK007 Codecs I have a complete on demand system that can play any type of media.

I use MediaCenterMaster to get program meta information, backdrops and thumbnails for MediaBrowser.

I also use MakeMKV to rip my DVD's and VideoReDo TVSuite h.264 to edit recorded TV shows and convert them to H.264 MKV's.

Oh and 7MC can show your digital pictures as a slide show on your big screen with background music.

I also love the screen saver where it shows random pictures from your picture library then zooms to one (or more) from a folder. When I first got this enabled the wife spent 45 minutes just watching the screen saver. Reply
powerarmour - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
Agreed, WMC is only EPG based Tuner app that can correctly use Freeview HD DVB-T2 Tuners in the UK, there are no other usable HTPC alternatives. Reply
psuedonymous - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Question: why was the obsolete 2-pass method used instead of the faster (and more common) CRF? Was the encoding benchmark intended as an artificial CPU-stressing benchmark rather than a 'real world' encoding benchmark? Reply
ganeshts - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Hmm.. that is what Graysky's benchmark does, and it keeps the setting consistent across different systems when you want to see how much better or worse your system is, when compared to someone else's.

FWIW, pass 1 stresses the memory subsystem, while pass 2 stresses the CPU. Reply
geekfool - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
It isn't true that pass 1 is memory bound. It is still CPU-bound, it just uses faster analysis and the performance of the lookahead thread(s) and slicetype decision becomes critical (they caps the encoding speed, basically).

Until revision 2200, the lookahead was single-threaded, so the speed of this thread effectively limited your speed in 1st pass. Since revision 2200 though, this operation is threaded too (speeding up 1st pass usually and greatly improving cpu utilisation during it), so even the single-threaded performance doesn't matter as much as before. AFAIK the unofficial x264 benchmark HD 5.0 has revision 2200, but I might be wrong on that one.

P.S.: I dropped by #x264 at irc.freenode.org to confirm this with lead developer of x264 ;) Reply
ganeshts - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Thanks for the info. I was looking at the FAQ hosted by TechARP here: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442&... ;

Also, look at Ian's test with various memory speeds here using the same processor (last section on this page):

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/memory-performa...

There is definitely an impact on pass 1 performance using different memory speeds and the impact is more than on pass 2. Reply
geekfool - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Oh, I see. Well, the speed difference was relativelly minor in that test. right (and that was with 1333 MHz versus 2400 MHz DDR3). So I wouldn't say it "stresses memory subsystem", if the speed gains are this small, IMHO.

As for the information on Tech ARP's site about 1st pass. Well, they don't necesarilly need to be correct, they are not experts on the encoder's architecture after all (also, that sentence on their is is probably years old now).

The reason CPU utilisation used to be low on 1st pass isn't due to lookahead not being multi-threaded in the past as i said.

It is true though that per single frame, during fast encoding like in 1st pass, less cpu cycles are needed. Still the main performance factor is always the CPU, so buying a faster CPU is always much more beneficial than investments in faster memory, which only helps a little. Reply
geekfool - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Argh, sorry, I'm a bit tired....
"The reason CPU utilisation used to be low on 1st pass isn't due to lookahead not being multi-threaded in the past as i said."

Should have been: "The reason CPU utilisation used to be low during 1st pass is due to lookahead not being multi-threaded in the past, as i said." Reply
Iketh - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Why is Prime95 v25.9 used? That is grossly outdated. The latest official 27.7 is needed to tax Ivy Bridge with AVX instructions. All those temps and watts you got will increase significantly. Please revise your Prime95. An oversight like this is unacceptable.

Not to mention the latest Intel compilers have been implementing AVX instructions for like 6+ months now even if the programmer didn't specifically write for it. AND Handbrake has been using AVX in about that same timeframe and is only increasing..... Reply