G530 Celeron or G630 Pentium for HTPC...?

[Vimes]

Hi

I have a Z77 D3H motherboard that I'll be using to build an HTPC and I have noticed that there is around £12 difference between the G530 Celeron and the G630 Pentium.

The HTPC will be used with a TV card, playing 1080p material and streaming / possibly recording TV.

So will either of those be fine for a HTPC and has anyone used one without issues in such a build...?

I will be coupling it with a NVidia GT430 separate graphics card.

I'm hoping that the board will boot ok with one of those in as according to the Gigabyte page it states that support for those two chips was introduced with the F18 bios and I know that it has the F16 bios on it.

Thanks

 

[passey89]

im using a g540 as it was cheaper than the G530 the other week. works perfectly with a 5450 as tv card.

 

[Vimes]

mmm - thanks for that

So it seems that the Celeron should be fine for a HTPC, especially with a GT 430 to do a lot of the DXVA stuff.

 

[passey89]

yeh Was wathcin my cpu usage on a 1080p film and it was hardly moving.

I put a 60GB SSD into mine as well just so it boots in super speed.

 

[MeatLoaf]

G530 here no problems

 

[Vimes]

Maybe it was me then in assuming that a Celeron would not be quite up to the job of a HTPC, even with a dedicated GPU to do the DXVA stuff.

 

[passey89]

with a dedicated gpu the cpu doesn't do much.

If you also put a dedicated sound card in as well thats even less for it to do.

 

[Vimes]

On the sound aspect I would have thought that as I use optical out then both DTS and DD would not take up too much processing as the Sound system I'm using would do that bit..?

Phew just checked and I'm now reassured as the board does indeed have an optical out for S/PDIF..!

 

[passey89]

yeh my board didnt have spdif out which is y i got the sound card anyway

 

[Marine-RX179]

Maybe it was me then in assuming that a Celeron would not be quite up to the job of a HTPC, even with a dedicated GPU to do the DXVA stuff.

According to bench though, the G530 is around as fast as a stock clock Core2Duo E8400...so despite the Celeron label, it would still be quite capable (unlike the old Celerons).

 

[Davedree]

Unless you need to encode then a. G530 or g540 will do the job. Shame you didn't use a mi-itx instead.

 

[leoncao]

nowadays cpu has less thing to do if you have a decent graphics card. should be alright

 

[Vimes]

The Z77 D3H wasn't planned for an HTPC it is just how things have worked out. But I do have a HTPC with 5x2TB drives in it (and a SSD as a boot drive) and thus I do like the space a larger case offers.