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
- Ivy Bridge
- Windows 8
- HTPC
- Passive Cooling
- Intel
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 |
140 Comments
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lotharamious - Monday, January 21, 2013 - link
No real useful advantages. But, it's $40. Oh yeah, and new task manager, new file copy dialog, storage spaces, data deduplication, WAY less naggy updates, fast boot (way faster than 7), extra dimension in your start menu for more stuff.Nothing at all. Reply
ol1bit - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
My Win 7 HTPC works just fine with my network streaming Silcon Dust dual tuner.I rebuilt by gaming PC with Windows 8 and after a week I couldn't take it anymore, re-installed Win7-64bit.
-Stupid UI
-Dumbed down for Grandpa and Grandma
- Stupid colors in office (aka none per se)
- COD4 and older games don't work.
Win7 has none of these issues, so if the only benefit I get is a netflix app that uses a tad less power, and a crappy UI forget it. Reply
JlHADJOE - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - link
"Fast boot" is fast because it changes normal shutdown to "hibernate".If you force the OS to do a proper reboot, there's no improvement over 7. Reply
justniz - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
Actually you can do a lot more with Linux than just surf YT. Check out MythTV. It is a VERY capable PVR/HTPC suite.In my opinion, much better than any product available for windows, and free too. Reply
SantaAna12 - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Aii yii yii!No I dont have Windows Pro 8.....pay up! Reply
a2f - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Is there any way we could get a look at how you have configured the various settings for the LAV filters and madVR for our own personal testing? Replygeekfool - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
That would indeed be helpful, because teh performance of the scaling algorithms differs a lot. lanczos3 is more demanding than bicubic, and jinc3 (not to mention higher variants) is even slower (sadly, it seems to be the best upscaling method). On top of that, there is the highly beneficial anti-ringing (AR) feture that further increases the performance requirements.For illustration, jinc3 upscaling with AR) reached to 40ms processing time per frame (1920×1080 target resolution) in some cases on A8-3850 (1600 MHz RAM). With that, it starts to stutter in panning scenes even with 24 fps content. Lanczos4 AR is fine.
It would be interesting to see which scaling methods are actually viable on HD 4000... Reply
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. Reply
Mangix - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
in regards to the refresh rate issue, which i am not too familiar with, have you tried modifying the EDID in the registry to help fix it?link: http://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-Custom-Re... Reply
dubya911 - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
How do the final capabilities of this compare to the plethora of android mini PCs floating around? Things like the MK802, G-Box etc seem to have a beta version of XBMC with network storage support now. Or if you want to move upscale a bit googleTV, Roku etc?Other than the fun of putting it together is there an upside? My napkin math puts this build north of $600. That is a lot of delta to make up. Reply