Pentium III 500 mhz Client Only

[paulbeers]

Anyone using a Pentium III 500 mhz for a client box? My office is getting rid of a whole bunch of old computers and I was thinking that if slapped in a geforce fx5200 and a sound card, these could make a good client machine....Any thoughts?

[gplasky]

Actually a box like that could make a better server than a client. Especially if you weren't using it to watch Sage. The client needs to do most of the processing of the mpeg2 file. Since it is software driven a good speedy processor with a DirectX 9 hardware supported video card is going to work best for your client. Especially as people move more towards recording HDTV.

Gerry

[paulbeers]

Actually I had already thought of doing that. They actually have quite a few of them, so I was going to look into not only usin one as a server, but also as clients for basic SDTV. I already have client box for my HDTV, these would only be for my non hdtv televisions.


Edit: Just realised that the 440BX chipset that they have only has an ATA/33 primary IDE port. That would be a serious limitation for a server and would basically require me to get a PCI hard drive controller.

[RedR]

I run one of my SageTV clients off a P3-700 w/ 512MB ram. It's slow but doesn't burp once the show/movie starts.

[heffe2001]

Drop a X-Card in there and your video wouldn't skip on that 500 I'm betting. Still might be a bit slow on the UI though.

[Opus4]

Older/slower PCs can be used, but there are several things to be aware of (some mentioned above): they do fine for recording, but I found that my older PC didn't have a very good case in terms of cooling, so it ate hard drives as the heat finally got them one by one; a new IDE controller will often be needed to get something better than ATA/33; and additional memory may be needed, depending on what it already has.

For a client/playback:

An Xcard helps for playback, but if you want the UI on the TV via the Xcard, the slow PC acts against you if you use the Xcard plugin, since it has to convert all screens to 256 colors & that takes cpu time.

If you plan to add HD recordings, you may want a faster system to be able to play them.

- Andy

[steingra]

My slowest machine that I have as a SagetV client is a celeron ~630 Mhz based PIII system. Its running Windows XP PRO, 384MB ram, 100 Mbps network card, standard 40 GB 7200 rpm hard drive ata 100, and a geforce 4000?? card (sorry dont remember exact model). But it was cheapest card new from best buy. I used the Svideo port on it, as a test, to a SDTV, and the sagetv content looked acceptable by most normal tv watchers.

Also, I shut down all un needed services, startup programs, etc so that most of the RAM was free upon starting up the system.

I made sure my network was performing as fast as possible. And it turns out sagetv was only using about 4 Mbps during playback (according to Windows task manager anyway)

I purchased the PureVideo codec/drivers for it, and they seemed to help a little on response time. The system runs around 70% CPU usage on average. And didnt skip or stutter or anything. It ran clean. I tried other codecs and they seem to consume more CPU. In fact certain combinations seemed to consume 99% of CPU.

But I watched several shows recorded at 2-2.5 GB/hour DVD quality settings, and they looked fine.

My goal was to resurrect this PC for as cheap as possible (just the 40$ video card and the PureVideo software). And I would say it was a success. I would be OK using it in a bedroom or kids room as a basic client playback machine.

I feel I could do more to tweak it, but dont have time to do more right now.. over the winter I will try to tweak it some more.

PS
The SageTV GUI was kind of slow drawing itself on the monitor or TV, but not terrible.

So thats my 2 cents anyway.

Edit: Oh yeah I also installed a Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore Dxr3 Card. I had several mothballed from the old days. They are supposed to playback mpeg2 content in their own hardware, offloading it from the main CPU. I ran out of time to really get a good feel for whether or not it helped a lot. But I do believe it dropped the CPU usage down like 5%-10% based on my initial test. Which when you are talking about these older machines, 5%-10% is a LOT!

[JonTom]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Anyone using a Pentium III 500 mhz for a client box? My office is getting rid of a whole bunch of old computers and I was thinking that if slapped in a geforce fx5200 and a sound card, these could make a good client machine....Any thoughts?

I tested a PIII 450 w/ 512mb RAM and WinXP, various video cards (G400MAX, GF3, GF4MX). Video playback was fine, but the UI was WAAAAY too slow for daily use. So now I use my laptop.