I appreciate this may not be the best forum for something as low as a HTPC (my gaming rigg scoffs at the idea!) but as I had such a great response from my previous Gaming Rig build thread I figured I've got nothing to lose by asking.
Had a bit of a crap day today and that's why I'm here asking for advice as I probably should have done initially. I've been watching a lot of NFL this season on my PC upstairs and figured I'd get myself a nice little machine to sit under the TV and run Windows 7 and XBMC. It needs to run windows 7 as I watch the NFL using NFL GamePass which uses Flash.
After advice from some friends on what they use for XBMC I opted to go for a Revo 3700 4GB as they said they stream fine and XBMC will do 1080p. After it arrived this morning I immediately formatted it as it came with Linpus and installed Windows 7. Configured XBMC and updated drivers, did updates, installed AV, etc. Then I came to watch a game and it stuttered like hell.
Did some reading on it and apparently NFL Gamepass is coded in a way that doesn't support properly offloading to the GPU and as the processor inside is pretty crap it means I get a choppy video that is pretty much unwatchable! Youtube and other sites seem to stream fine though apparently they are coded better and thus offload to the GPU, the same happens with Sky Player.
So now I'm going to try my hardest to return it and failing that will sell it for a loss on somewhere like ebay (an expensive mistake I'll certainly learn from!).
Back to why I'm posting. Could anyone suggest a build that whilst not a powerhouse will be good enough to stream HD content at 3000Kbps without the need of a dedicated GPU? And fairly quiet and small so as to sit with my PS3 and Xbox? I'm not expecting anything quite as small as the Revo but figured I'd see what you guys can come up with.
Hope I've not bored you all too much with all the information but kind of wanted to get it all off my chest, felt gutted when I realised I wouldn't be watching any NFL the Revo as returning it will be difficult beings as I've formatted the bugger!
Hope someone can help! Budget is around £200 up to £300 max. Would need all components including HDD and RAM.
Had a bit of a crap day today and that's why I'm here asking for advice as I probably should have done initially. I've been watching a lot of NFL this season on my PC upstairs and figured I'd get myself a nice little machine to sit under the TV and run Windows 7 and XBMC. It needs to run windows 7 as I watch the NFL using NFL GamePass which uses Flash.
After advice from some friends on what they use for XBMC I opted to go for a Revo 3700 4GB as they said they stream fine and XBMC will do 1080p. After it arrived this morning I immediately formatted it as it came with Linpus and installed Windows 7. Configured XBMC and updated drivers, did updates, installed AV, etc. Then I came to watch a game and it stuttered like hell.
Did some reading on it and apparently NFL Gamepass is coded in a way that doesn't support properly offloading to the GPU and as the processor inside is pretty crap it means I get a choppy video that is pretty much unwatchable! Youtube and other sites seem to stream fine though apparently they are coded better and thus offload to the GPU, the same happens with Sky Player.
So now I'm going to try my hardest to return it and failing that will sell it for a loss on somewhere like ebay (an expensive mistake I'll certainly learn from!).
Back to why I'm posting. Could anyone suggest a build that whilst not a powerhouse will be good enough to stream HD content at 3000Kbps without the need of a dedicated GPU? And fairly quiet and small so as to sit with my PS3 and Xbox? I'm not expecting anything quite as small as the Revo but figured I'd see what you guys can come up with.
Hope I've not bored you all too much with all the information but kind of wanted to get it all off my chest, felt gutted when I realised I wouldn't be watching any NFL the Revo as returning it will be difficult beings as I've formatted the bugger!
Hope someone can help! Budget is around £200 up to £300 max. Would need all components including HDD and RAM.
