New HTPC Suggestions Please

[foxwood]

Microsoft recommends one CPU core per extender.

Microsoft recommends one 2007 era cpu core per extender. An ivy-bridge hyperthreaded dual core CPU won't bat an eye lid at the workload of 5 extenders.

Lot's of people on here claim to have 4+ extenders on their systems - surely someone can spend a quiet Saturday morning verifying this once and for all, instead of referring to ancient Microsoft recommendations?

[LuckyDay]

The reason Microsoft recommends one core per extender is so that the menus in each extender will be snappy. Running five extenders on a quad-core i5 actually doesn't meet this recommendation... but it should be fine. I wouldn't try 5 extenders on a dual-core CPU.

And with HT you've got 4 effective cores on an i3. Again, maybe if you're using everything at the same time and also using the PC for something else, but as just a server were 2-3 are going to be in use at any one time, it shouldn't be a problem.

[LuckyDay]

Microsoft recommends one CPU core per extender.

Microsoft recommends one 2007 era cpu core per extender. An ivy-bridge hyperthreaded dual core CPU won't bat an eye lid at the workload of 5 extenders.

Lot's of people on here claim to have 4+ extenders on their systems - surely someone can spend a quiet Saturday morning verifying this once and for all, instead of referring to ancient Microsoft recommendations?

Yeah, I game fairly often on my WMC PC while two other extenders in the house are in use. I really doubt 4-5 extenders would be an issue..

[foxwood]

Also, I'd recommend Windows 7 Professional, not Home Premium. There are a lot of extra security options in Professional, and it only costs a few bucks more if you get the OEM version.

There is only one feature in Pro that's not in Home Premium that you might take advantage of for a HTPC setup - Remote Desktop support. (AFAIR there are hacks available to add Remote Desktop to Home Premium).

Windows 7 Feature Comparison

[barnabas1969]

I'm one of those with 5 extenders (one is not currently in use). I'm running a quad-core i5-760. With all four extenders playing live/recorded shows while simultaneously watching a show on the TV that is connected to the PC, all four cores of the CPU run at around 30%, unless ShowAnalyzer is busy scanning a show or two... at which point each worker thread of SA will take 100% of a single core, but runs at a lower priority so that other processes are not affected very much. I limit SA to two worker threads so that there are always two cores that are nowhere near 100% busy.

Obviously, at 30% busy, the CPU can be doing more. However, the busier the CPU becomes, the longer it takes for an idle process to respond to the user. Somewhere around 70-80% busy, the amount of work per additional percent of CPU busy time diminishes. In other words, let's say that a CPU does 4 units of work at 80% busy. It seems logical that it would then perform 5 units of work when it is 100% busy, but that's not the reality. The CPU queue length (the number of processes waiting for a slice of the CPU's time) tends to grow exponentially between 80-100%, and memory management (a high-priority function of the CPU) starts to represent a much larger portion of the CPU's time.

Hyperthreading is not the same thing as an additional core. At best, hyperthreading gives you about a 20% boost in performance.

I'll leave it at this... do you want snappy performance on your extenders? Get a CPU core for each of them.