Hello,
So my wife and I are going to replace our aging BluRay player and I originally wanted to build a HTPC, but now I'm tossing around the idea of buying a cheaper PS3 instead.
I do have a test HTPC using an old AMD Athlon x2 3800+ with 2GB RAM, 64bit Windows 7, and XBMC. Movies seem to stream just fine because they are not compressed and need no decoding. NetFlix, on the other hand, drops frames like crazy and the CPU will sit around 80% (I'm going to NetFlix on my wife's laptop tonight, which is lightyears ahead of my HTPC as far as hardware), and I am seeing some other anomolies like an odd bar at the top of the screen where the video seems to lag. I'm still investigating wheather or not this is an aging hardware issue, or something to expect on a HTPC, but hopefully some of you have experience with this!
I do have a $700 list of parts selected on Newegg for an HTPC including an i5-3570k (4000 graphics), 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, HTPC case, BluRay player, and Gigabyte microATX mobo. I do have a spare 1GB 8400GS graphics card but I won't use it unless I have to. I hear the 4000 works just fine on a HTPC, but again, maybe someone has experience with that too. While all of my movie rips are uncompressed MKV files, I may compress some of them in the future.
So besides cost, what do we have for pros/cons between an HTPC and PS3? Can a HTPC really have the same, or better video/audio quality than a dedicated BluRay player or PS3?
So my wife and I are going to replace our aging BluRay player and I originally wanted to build a HTPC, but now I'm tossing around the idea of buying a cheaper PS3 instead.
I do have a test HTPC using an old AMD Athlon x2 3800+ with 2GB RAM, 64bit Windows 7, and XBMC. Movies seem to stream just fine because they are not compressed and need no decoding. NetFlix, on the other hand, drops frames like crazy and the CPU will sit around 80% (I'm going to NetFlix on my wife's laptop tonight, which is lightyears ahead of my HTPC as far as hardware), and I am seeing some other anomolies like an odd bar at the top of the screen where the video seems to lag. I'm still investigating wheather or not this is an aging hardware issue, or something to expect on a HTPC, but hopefully some of you have experience with this!
I do have a $700 list of parts selected on Newegg for an HTPC including an i5-3570k (4000 graphics), 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, HTPC case, BluRay player, and Gigabyte microATX mobo. I do have a spare 1GB 8400GS graphics card but I won't use it unless I have to. I hear the 4000 works just fine on a HTPC, but again, maybe someone has experience with that too. While all of my movie rips are uncompressed MKV files, I may compress some of them in the future.
So besides cost, what do we have for pros/cons between an HTPC and PS3? Can a HTPC really have the same, or better video/audio quality than a dedicated BluRay player or PS3?