Building an AMD HTPC – Capable of Blu-ray HD Audio Playback
While there are a few areas that I may make different component choices to save a few bucks, there was one part of this article that I really thought was nice. They ran their setup with four different CPUs in order to see which would be enough for smoth HD playback. At the end, they then take power measurements on each of them. The only thing that I would have done differently is see what power draw was while doing HD playback. They only took idle and load measurements.
We
had an incredibly large amount of fun researching this article and
getting the parts in from all the friendly companies who helped out
here. It wasn’t much of a decision when it came to deciding which
processor to use – of course the X4 9950 offers the best performance,
but that is at the expense of much more power usage. We ended up
picking the X2 4850E since it is more than powerful for solid and
smooth Blu-ray playback, uses the least amount of power out of all
parts we tested and is also the cheapest of the bunch. The choice was
easy in the end.