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- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Intel
- HTPC
- Ivy Bridge
- Windows 8
- Passive Cooling
Concluding Remarks
Our experience with a passive Ivy Bridge HTPC has brought to fore many interesting aspects. On the surface, Windows 8 doesn't have any capabilities to tempt users to upgrade. In fact, the removal of Windows Media Center and presenting it as a separate $10 upgrade has actually served as a deterrent for many HTPC users. I would strongly suggest HTPC users relying on WMC (irrespective of the OS) to move on to other platforms. However, a few days of using Windows 8 as our primary HTPC OS has completely altered our opinion.
Overall, Windows 8 seems to be a very efficient OS (in terms of boot time as well as power consumption). GPU acceleration for video decode and playback is very well integrated and acts in an effective manner for all types of streaming services (including Netflix and YouTube). Not only do we get higher quality material delivered to the Netflix app, the power consumption during playback is actually a full 15 W lower. XBMC and JRiver MC18 work without issues on Windows 8.
The Intel HD 4000 GPU is quite capable of madVR with the default scaling algorithms as long as it is paired with DDR3-1600 DRAM. On our system, we were able to get madVR working without issues. The DXVA scaling feature of madVR enables users to get good scaling quality in a power efficient manner, thanks to the hardware scalers in the HD 4000 GPU. Of course, the GPU is going to struggle with advanced scaling algorithms. We will cover that (along with 4K decode and display performance) in the third and final installment of our HTPC series. The concluding piece will pit the latest passive HTPC GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA against each other and provide readers with the insights on what exactly they have to offer over the Intel HD 4000 GPU.
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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.
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.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?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.
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.
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.....
ganeshts - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
I will definitely do some experiments with the new Prime95 and report back.ganeshts - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
I repeated the CPU loading with the latest Prime95 (v27.7):http://i.imgur.com/lK0zqjR.png
The readings didn't go up significantly, but, yes, there is an increase. The power consumption at the wall increased from 58.25 to 62.56 W.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and we will make sure future reviews use the updated Prime95.
ganeshts - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
Oh, but, with full GPU and CPU loading (using Furmark 1.10.3 - latest), the power at the wall is only 89.77 W (compared to 88.75 W earlier). The ~40 W / ~15W TDP distribution between the CPU and the GPU still remains the same.http://i.imgur.com/soCGAyk.jpg
I don't expect the steady state temperatures to be that different because the power increase at the wall is only 1 W.
ganeshts - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Yes, the scaling algorithms affect the performance a lot.That is why I mentioned that we used the default settings: Bicubic with sharpness 75 for chroma (no anti-ringing filter), Lanczos 3-tap for image upscaling / Catmull-Rom for image downscaling (no anti-ringing filter or linear light scaling),
We will look at other scaling algorithms and their performance on the HD 4000 / GT 640 / AMD 7750 in the third part of the HTPC series.
Also, a note that if you are using HD 4000 (or any other Intel HD Graphics), I would strongly suggest looking at DXVA Scaling. Users might be surprised at the quality delivered without taxing the GPU too much.