Keep Opty 148 for media center?

[durbs]

I've just ordered a new X2 4600 tonight to replace my current Opteron 148 for 2 reasons:
1. Lovely OC price on the 4600 and..
2. I've never really been happy with the performance of the 148, i'd clocked it a bit and it gave nice benchmarks but real world performance didnt reflect its score, i mainly use Visual Studio 2003/2005, SQL and video editors such as Vegas and it really chugged in all these, especially VS.net 2005 and Vegas. Hopefully the new duel core should give me a better working experience!

Thing is i'm wondering whether to keep the 148 and build a media center PC around it but was wondering if anyone has used one of these in media center before and will it be up to the job of HD video etc? If i could use this in the build it'd save me a few bob and i could buy one of the cheap 939 bare bones Shuttle things. Never used Media Center so dont know how processor hungry it is for tasks such as recording telly?

Cheers.

 

[Justintime]

It'll be fine.

 

[Defcon5]

It will be more than fine, youl be able to under clock and volt it to make the med center quieter too.


And if you can, swap the 4600 for a 4400

 

[durbs]

And if you can, swap the 4600 for a 4400

Aaargh, You had me confused for a minute there but just noticed the cache size of my 4600 on the product page, hadnt looked properly and just assumed they were all 1MB

Doh, got to sort a swop now.

 

[durbs]

Nope, bit of a googling session at the pros and cons of cache vs clock and i've decided to stick with the 4600, think it'll be faster for what i need as i'm not clocking this particular machine, it'll run at stock as its my main development machine.

 

[cavemanoc]

Snap! I'm using my 148 in my Media PC and it's great - I really can't bear the shame of underclocking it so it's sitting at 3Gig with a pelted x800, so yes it is massively overkill, but at least it means I can play BF2 on the big screen when the Guest/Computer room is out of action (In fact it's the one in my sig, but it's lost the CPU pelt and the chiller to another project)

 

[durbs]

Snap! I'm using my 148 in my Media PC and it's great

Nice one, gonna start building as soon as i work out a way to explain to the missus why we need another PC in the lounge! Going to be piped through my nice new Samsung shiny black HDTV. Mmmmmm.

 

[cavemanoc]

Keep telling her it's a cheap way of having sky+ (which would be true if you included the subscription cost over about 73 years ) - then when she's gone, get some big screen gaming going!