Just FYI: My experiences with new AMD E350 based Mini-ITX and Win 7

[stevech]

Just FYI: My experiences with new AMD E350 based Mini-ITX and Win 7... as a combo media server and Home Theater PC

My Mini-ITX enclosure has had a gen-1 Atom motherboard for a long time. Too slow to do HD video. OK for standard definition and web surfing; was a $70 mobo.
I research (too much), studied and debated long about what comes next. I decided on a Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 mobo.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128468&Tpk=GA-E350N-USB3
(though I bought at Fry's on a semi-whim and their price-match).

I didn't want a mobo with a separately purchased CPU chip. The '350, like others, has a graphics processor (GPU) on the same die/chip as the CPU. My emphasis is on a GPU that can do 1080 HD video properly and less so a fast CPU. And I again get to buy-AMD, just my vote to avoid an Intel CPU monopoly and what that would do to prices.

I am very pleased and surprised with the '350. As follows.
$120 for the mobo, plus one 2GB stick of DDR3 RAM for $18. Can add 2nd.
The rest, I already had (enclosure, disks, power supply, Windows 7 license).

Some buzz words
DB15 VGA, HDMI, DVIX - display output connectors
USB3 and USB2 - ports aplenty
SATA 3 (no SATA 6, not important to me)
gigE - ethernet
n.n - sound, too many audio jacks to count
S/PDIF - sound
Fan: small silent one on CPU heat sink. Could be better. Good 'nuf

Some numbers:
30Watts - AC power consumption with 3.5in disk spinning.
5.5 - Windows experience rating for RAM
4.2 - rating for Desktop/Aero graphics
5.5 - rating for gaming graphics (wonder how this relates to DirectX11 H.264 decoding?)
5.9 - disk transfer rating (generic 7200 RPM, 160GB Western digital SATA disk)
3.8 - CPU rating - CPU is just a dual-core 1.6GHz. DDR3 RAM seems to help a lot.

80MBytes/sec - PC to PC transfer speed, gigE LAN, windows drag-and-drop of an 8 GB video file. (speed according to Windows' dialog box)
30MBytes/sec - PC to PC transfer speed for a folder with many smaller files
(source PC is an AMD3800 with generic 3.5in. SATA disks).

Some qualitative info
1680 x 1050 LCD monitor - Just fine... web surfing. Snappy windows. DB15 connection to monitor.
1680 x 1050 LCD monitor - Just fine... with H.264 HD video (.ts file), Windows Media Player. DB15 connection to monitor.
1920 x 1080 to HD TV (Vizio). Looks great. Worked first try. Sound too (just stereo).
Windows Media Center (WMC) playback of 1080i video recorded by my Hauppauge HD-PVR. Looks great. No dropped frames.
MoCA 70Mbps or less - speed used for the above playback with WMC via LAN. No ethernet at TV's placement, so MoCA)

An Issue, maybe not unique to the '350
Viewing 1808i video, '350 PC on gigE LAN connection.
Startup concurrent transfer of big file.
Video playback begins to drop frames. File transfer hogging too much LAN bandwidth and/or TCP/IP stack on the '350 can't go fast enough while doing video too? Prioritization issue? Transfer mode is simply drag-drop (CIFS) with Windows 7. Sum of two transfers exceeded what the PC's IP stack and or LAN/switch can do?
So, Doctor, it hurts when I do that - watch HD and transfer HD files to the same PC that's doing the display creation: Well, don't do that! Or somehow reduce priority or LAN rate from sending PC. Or some such.

Viewing 1080p video: Didn't do so. Non-existent on my cable TV service. If I had any Blue-Ray, I'd use my DVD drive direct to the TV. But first, I'd need a more expensive TV that's capable of 1080p rather than 1080i max.

Other than the above, I am just delighted with the cost/performance.

 

[00Roush]

Stevech-

Thanks for posting! I have kinda been interested in the performance of the E350 platform. Especially as an NAS even though it isn't really designed for it. I wondered how much throughput the platform could handle versus an Atom setup. So far the highest numbers I have heard about from an Atom based NAS/server is about 160 MB/sec total throughput.

I might be able to help you with this...

An Issue, maybe not unique to the '350
Viewing 1808i video, '350 PC on gigE LAN connection.
Startup concurrent transfer of big file.
Video playback begins to drop frames. File transfer hogging too much LAN bandwidth and/or TCP/IP stack on the '350 can't go fast enough while doing video too? Prioritization issue? Transfer mode is simply drag-drop (CIFS) with Windows 7. Sum of two transfers exceeded what the PC's IP stack and or LAN/switch can do?
So, Doctor, it hurts when I do that - watch HD and transfer HD files to the same PC that's doing the display creation: Well, don't do that! Or somehow reduce priority or LAN rate from sending PC. Or some such.

It reminds me of the network throttling that was implemented in Vista except in reverse. For example I recall hearing about many issues of people who were playing music/video and were trying to transfer files but would end up getting horrible file transfer speeds. This was by design to ensure media had priority over other network traffic. To my knowledge this is still implemented in Windows 7 by default but I can't seem to trigger it on my machine. (I could in Vista) It is possible that somehow this is not being triggered on your machine either but it should be. What is your CPU usage when you are playing the video and transferring large files?

Here is an old thread about the Vista issue. And this is the link to the old Microsoft KB about it.

00Roush

 

[stevech]

Thanks. That's a form of QoS or bandwidth fairness? Didn't know Windows had that. Ideally, the QoS should ensure that the video stream isn't starved-out. Is this in the Win 7 firewall software? The IP stack?

Is Windows doing stateful packet inspection or just based on socket/port numbers?

Anyway, it's a non-issue for me as the test I ran, discussed in my post, pushes a file from a Win 7 machine to the Win 7 (E350) that's busy displaying HD. That E450 PC would never store videos on its own disk anyway, it would use the LAN.

I can try a big transfer that doesn't use the E350 PC as the destination and confirm there's no impact to the video stream. HOWEVER! I wouldn't be moving video files around on the LAN; they're stored on the Win7 computer's disks and read on-demand. So the big file transfers were just a curiosity.

CPU load: the E350 with 1080i to the HD TV has the CPUs at about 50%. I've read about using better CODECs than Win 7 has for default, and reducing the CPU to 20% or so. But it's not a high priority to me as the HTPC has nothing else of note to do while doing a video display.

I'm investigating this as an alternative to my current SageTV setup where the TV is driven by a Sage Extender, for HD via HDMI. SageTV was acquired by Google and will disappear into the corporate black hole.

Also plan to migrate my web surfing via TV remote's buttons - an application for Windows that I wrote long ago and we use heavily to see webcams around the world and certain web sites with weather graphics by city, etc. This is full screen graphics and keyboard entry of URLs isn't done.