My performance numbers with all four extenders running

[barnabas1969]

I just recently got a new TV in the living room, and was able to move the "temporary" TV that I was using in the living room back to the master bedroom. Now I can use all four extenders and the main PC simultaneously.

I thought it might be interesting to post my performance numbers with all four extenders playing HD content, plus the main PC playing HD content simultaneously... a total of 5 TV's in the house all playing HD content simultaneously. Three of them are playing live TV, two are playing recorded TV. You can see details of my hardware setup in my signature (more detailed) as well as in my profile here on TGB.tv (less detailed). I have four CableCARD tuners, two hybrid tuners (ClearQAM plus analog cable), one dedicated ClearQAM tuner, and one analog cable tuner (total of 8 tuners).

The CPU is bouncing around between 25-35% busy, and the RAM is hovering around 6.3GB in use (a great reason to use 64-bit Windows when you have more than one extender). I sure am glad that I followed Microsoft's recommendation to use one CPU core per extender, plus a minimum of 2GB of RAM for the PC and an additional 1GB of RAM for each extender. This means that M$ recommended 6GB for my setup... and I'm using 6.3 out of my 8GB. I guess they know what they are talking about sometimes.

All the extenders and the HTPC are responsive. Menus, guide, pause, play, FFWD, RWD, skip forward, skip back... all work quickly without delay on all TV's.

My Gigabit switch (not an expensive one) is pretty busy, but all extenders show 100% network performance on the graph. I ran the network performance tuner on each of them while the other three were all playing HD content.

I thought that my setup might be a good guideline for folks who are planning to build an HTPC.

Edit: I suppose that I should also mention that my Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which is not integrated with the CPU (I am using a separate video card), is doing the bulk of the work for playing content on the main PC... so you could actually count this as a 5th core (total of 5 TV's in my setup). The CPU does very little work when playing content on the main PC.

[newfiend]

I have always wondered if I had enough RAM in my HTPC with the 2 Extenders I have. I have an XBOX and a DMA-2100. This was more trial and error on my part and I guess I got lucky..lol
I have 4GB currently but thought about adding a bit more up to 8 GB. I know I really don't need it so much but i do notice that starting up the xbox that the menu background loads before the menu itself at times and wondered if adding a bit more ram would help smooth it out a bit more .. What do you suggest? I might want to add another extender in the future also.
newfiend~

[barnabas1969]

You can always run the Windows Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) in the background, with it set to monitor physical RAM in use. Then, navigate around and do stuff that you would normally do. Occasionally swap to the Performance Monitor window to check the graph. By default, the graph takes a little more than a minute to run the entire length from left-to-right (you can change the refresh interval if you want to make it a longer period of time to fill the graph). If you never see the RAM in use hit 100% of your system RAM, then you're OK.

Windows caches some stuff in the swap file (unless you've disabled virtual memory) even when you have plenty of RAM free, but the active processes should always be in RAM as long as you don't have 100% of RAM in use.

If you have at least a little free RAM while you run your system under your maximum load, you should be fine. By "maximum load", I don't mean to run the system at 100% with some kind of performance benchmark software. I mean the maximum load that YOU would run it under in your setup. If the most you will ever do with the machine is to play 1080p/1080i/720p video on three TV's while navigating the guide, then that's YOUR maximum load.

In my case, the most CPU load on my machine happens when commercial skipping software is scanning the most recent recording(s). However, those processes run in a lower priority than everything else, so commercial scanning doesn't affect other stuff like navigating the guide very much because the higher priority processes (Media Center) take priority.