Question about using Vista Ultimate as my HTPC OS..

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Riddlinkidstoner

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My HTPC goes as follows:

AMD Athlon 2.2ghz Newcastle Skt 754
DFI Ultra 250GB nForce3 - Courtesy of ScoobyG. Thanks man. :D
512mb Super Talent DDR400
eVGA 6600GT AGP 128mb
160GB+320GB Western Digital Caviars SATA
X-infinity 500W PSU
Antec P180 (I like my HTPC flashy and noticeable but relatively quiet :D)

So I have a few questions...

Will it run well? I'm running XP home on it so far and it runs super quick and great as my media machine...but I want to put Vista Ultimate on it and it sucks up a lot of resources.

1) If I use vLite will the system run better? All I'm using is the Vista Media Center.
2) What soundcard should I get? I'm hearing all this crap about Vista not being able to use certain soundcards so I want to get one that will last me a bit :D
3)What kind of tuner would I need to record OTA HDTV?
 
only 512 ram? I'd double up there...

Are you using the sound card just to pass through bit perfect to an external DAC / Receiver?

search this forum for "HD tuner"
 
Yes its to an external receiver...will software sound be fine then?
Yeah I guess I need 1GB :D I'll run it first and see how it runs...

Thanks :D
 
i'd get a chaintec AV-710. It's optical out, and will pass bit perfect unaltered signals to your reciever, which will do the DAC. It's like $20 or so on newegg, and will be much better than anything onboard for spdif out.
 
Seems like a waste of ~$300 to me. I mean, why would an HTPC need fancy effects?
 
just looking at your system specs i would say a big no to Vista..

Vista has no hardware acceleration support for HD or SD content, your playback will be less than great..

to test , if your using sage, us a software decoder (sage's built in) and make sur eyou can view content without any hardware acceleration..

beyond that i found vista to be the same as far as OSes go..

personally i switched back to XP + Sage just due to Vista's MCE limitations (no digital subchannels, no hardware acceleration)
 
i have sage...it runs flakely on my main machine so i dunno...thanks for the input though hehe.
 
H-street said:
just looking at your system specs i would say a big no to Vista..

Vista has no hardware acceleration support for HD or SD content, your playback will be less than great..
Click to expand...
What are you talking about? Vista does MPEG2 acceleration just like XP did; what are you smoking?

OP, there really isn't any reason to use more then Vista Premium especially if it's only going to be run on an HTPC. But yeah, you need atleast a gig of memory before you can go Vista and you don't really need a sound card (especially if this is just an HTPC).
 
CrimandEvil said:
What are you talking about? Vista does MPEG2 acceleration just like XP did; what are you smoking?

OP, there really isn't any reason to use more then Vista Premium especially if it's only going to be run on an HTPC. But yeah, you need atleast a gig of memory before you can go Vista and you don't really need a sound card (especially if this is just an HTPC).
Click to expand...


playback of SD content with my 7800GT (latest drivers) and using either the microsofts built in decoder or Purevideo both run in software mode under Vista Ultimate... both decoders peg my AMD 3500+ between 70-90% CPU (depending on SD or HD content).. By comparison i run 25-30% CPU on my WinXP machine with the Purevideo decoder for both SD and HD Content.

Vista might have the ability to do hardware but at this point in time it isn't..

this may not be any fault of Vista itself, probably more along the lines of an Nvidia driver issue (hence looking at his specs and he is running a GF6600).. But until that is fixed, Vista does not natively support the hardware acceleration he would need to run a software decoder..
 
i think running Vista on that machine is a waste of money and will only cost you more since you will need to upgrade half of it's internals to get the same performance out of Vista that you have with XP
 
I was just wondering cause thats severally different then the experience I had, played around with a copy of Home Premium and a 6150 mobo with a 3200+. SD content played back just fine using the built in codec (I didn't have the time the modify Vista to use the Purevideo decoder, it isn't supported in Vista yet). CPU usage was pretty much like it was with XP. Thats pretty much the same exact experience others using Vista have had, this is the first I've heard of anyone having an issue like this.
H-street said:
playback of SD content with my 7800GT (latest drivers) and using either the microsofts built in decoder or Purevideo both run in software mode under Vista Ultimate... both decoders peg my AMD 3500+ between 70-90% CPU (depending on SD or HD content).. By comparison i run 25-30% CPU on my WinXP machine with the Purevideo decoder for both SD and HD Content.

Vista might have the ability to do hardware but at this point in time it isn't..

this may not be any fault of Vista itself, probably more along the lines of an Nvidia driver issue (hence looking at his specs and he is running a GF6600).. But until that is fixed, Vista does not natively support the hardware acceleration he would need to run a software decoder..
Click to expand...
 
CrimandEvil said:
What are you talking about? Vista does MPEG2 acceleration just like XP did; what are you smoking?

OP, there really isn't any reason to use more then Vista Premium especially if it's only going to be run on an HTPC. But yeah, you need atleast a gig of memory before you can go Vista and you don't really need a sound card (especially if this is just an HTPC).
Click to expand...


does that dfi have spdif?
 
you don't need Vista for a htpc, but then again you don't need Vista for anything, not for home, office or business. Maybe wait a few years for the next OS.
 
use Windows Media Center Edition, NOT VISTA.

You're just begging for problems if you use Vista now.

Have you not seen the performance benchmarks on various sites,
or the big editorial on Nvidia's drivers not being fully functional for
Vista, etc..

Its needs AT LEAST a few months for drivers to get mature
and then another few months for patches & service packs to
get things up to par.

My current plan is to "upgrade" to Vista no earlier than 6 months from now and it will probably end up being a year or so before I make the jump.
 
Yeah I know but I'm getting a copy of retail ultimate for free...I'd still have to go out and BUY media center edition :D...

You made your points though...I'll just stick with using media player classic for now.
 
the way i did it is i just installed Vista without activating it (make sure to uncheck the "automatcially activate" during installation)..

my plan is just to periodically install vista to check out things are going..

and as long as i don't activate i can wait until i get a good sense of what machine it should go on etc..
 
ive been using vista ultimate on my htpc for at least 3 months now without any problems. The latest nvidia purevideo codec installs without any problems, as do the sse builds of ffdshow.

i like it much better than mce 2005.
 
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