Does anyone know if a Celeron 430 (Conroe 1.8GHz) can handle HDTV in a frontend only configuration? I have a Celeron D 336 (2.8GHz) in a frontend only configuration that can handle it well with XvMC enabled. It uses ~50% CPU and is nice and smooth. There is what appears to be a good deal at Fry's retail locations that bundles the 430 and an Abit IL9 Pro for $90 after $30 mailin rebate. One of my frontends has been acting up a bit lately (FE #2 if you follow the link in my signature, the AS8) and this deal at Fry's looks pretty good if I can get it to do HDTV.

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

That seems a bit under powered. You don't really want to go too much beyond the 50% used or you're going to start running into latency issues which will result in stalls.

Do you think the faster bus speed (800 vs 533 MHz) and larger cache (512 k v. 256 k) of the 430 could marginalize the slower CPU speed? I admit I don't know how these specs effect eachother. The only thing I know is that, in general, larger numbers = better.

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

I don't think it makes enough of a difference. HDTV playback is really CPU intensive.

I have a 1.8GHz P4, and even with an AGP Nvidia 5200 with xvmc turned on...it's still choppy with the CPU load pegged. This system works fine as a BackEnd system, but it fails as a HD FrontEnd.

2GHz would probably work, but it's pushed really hard.

My ASUS M2NVP-VM Mobo with an AMD 4200 x2 cpu shows a system load of 0.90 when playing back a 1080i HD stream. That means that one of the cores is pretty tapped out for playback at 2.2 GHz.

2Ghz is the sweet spot for HD playback. Invest in some reserve capacity!