C2D E8500 vs C2Q Q9300 for 1080p decoding...opinions...

[morph166955]

Hey all,
I'm looking for some opinions. Currently the two chips in question (C2D E8500 3.16Ghz vs C2Q Q9300 2.5Ghz) are exactly the same price so I'm facing a little bit of a dilemma. I'm building a HTPC for use on my new Sharp L42D64U 1080p LCD. I need to be able to decode and play both regular dvd but also bluray and h.264/mkv@1080p. I use powerdvd ultra 8 to play my bluray and the rest is done through windows xp mce2005/ffdshow/coreavc. My dilemma is that I'm not sure if a faster dual core will out perform a slower quad core for this purpose. I'm not going to say which way I'm leaning as to not influence anyone's opinions until later. I believe both are up to the task of successfully decoding even the highest bitrate's however I'd like to make sure that is the case.

Thanks in advance!

[Blue_MiSfit]

Doesn't matter. Both will decode 1080p off BluRay in pure software with absolutely no problems.

Surely you will have a nice little GPU with HDMI+HDCP ouput, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find one without H.264 / VC-1 decode acceleration at this stage - especially if you're doing it right and bitstreaming the HD audio tracks through HDMI ;)

~MiSfit

[dat720]

The 8500 will be faster more often than the 9300, as most programs are not multithread, like ffdshow and mce, not sure abotu core avc tho, my preference would be the E8500 which is what i am about to put in this machine untill the QX9600's get cheaper.

[slow4mula]

The 8500 will be faster more often than the 9300, as most programs are not multithread, like ffdshow and mce, not sure abotu core avc tho, my preference would be the E8500 which is what i am about to put in this machine untill the QX9600's get cheaper.

the quadcore will definately be the better option if you can afford it. even if the application isn't multi-threaded you will get a much better multitasking experience with a quadcore. if you ever end up doing any encoding/transcoding on the box as well you will see a huge benefit (especally in x264/avc/etc).

on the other hand if you just plan on decoding h264 content then the dual core will be fine...aka a media center box.

if you were going to have a dedicated gaming box then the faster speed dual core would probably be a better option.

overall..get the quadcore and a motherboard you can overclock it on...best of both worlds.

a quadcore @ 3ghz+ will give an overall performance advantage over a 4ghz dual core in almost anything except gaming.

if money is a concern and you don't do multitasking, encoding, etc. and will only decode and play games then by all means get the dual core.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Those arguments are perfectly valid for a desktop system, but this isn't a desktop system

1) The OP isn't gaming
2) Sound is surely an issue with an HTPC, so hot, overclocked quads are pretty much out IMO
3) Overclocking + HTPC seems to be a bad idea to me...
4) The OP isnt encoding, and even if he decides to, a dual is pretty durn fast :)

~MiSfit

[morph166955]

Those arguments are perfectly valid for a desktop system, but this isn't a desktop system

1) The OP isn't gaming
2) Sound is surely an issue with an HTPC, so hot, overclocked quads are pretty much out IMO
3) Overclocking + HTPC seems to be a bad idea to me...
4) The OP isnt encoding, and even if he decides to, a dual is pretty durn fast :)

~MiSfit

1) bingo...this is going to be used only for watching tv/movies in my bedroom
2&3) im not a fan of overclocking...
4) I have a dual X5355 quadcore xeon machine with 8 gig of ram and 4TB of disk space to do my encoding in...it does 1080p in realtime...thats fast enough for me lol.

Thanks for all the opinions! I think the big question at this point is will powerdvd's decoder work multithreaded or not. If so, then the quadcore makes more sense. If not, the dual core makes sense. coreavc is multithreaded so I should see a performance boost with it on a quadcore simply because there are more cores.

[dat720]

My HTPC is a HP DC7600 system with a Pentium D 3.2ghz 1.5gb ram and a total of 3 tuner card's (Haupage PVR150MCE, Divico Fusion Lite and a USB Avermedia DVB Volar), i can watch 1 channel while recording from the sat tv stb, or record 2 digital channels and watch sat tv at the same time, the system performs flawlessly, regardless if it's sd content or hd content. It plain and simply does not need a faster CPU

[morph166955]

My other media center is a 2.8Ghz C2D and when I push some of my bluray content through it the cpu pegs close to 95%. Granted those scenes are around 40-45mbit/s and thats not common however I don't want to risk underpowering and getting jumpyness from a cpu thats not fast enough when it matters.

[morph166955]

The E8500 just dropped $60...it wins lol

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yup :)

If you get a GPU acceleration on there, you can watch BluRay with CPU usage under 20% :)

~MiSfit