E8500 Processor Question

[Visitor Q]

Just in the process of building a new PC and got this processor to boot. Question is, what would be best OS for running a front end like HS on a media center like PC? Should I run XP 32 or 64 with this guy?

Thanks.

Jason

ps. Sorry but I am a little out of the current PC loop.

[brian_hoffman]

It doesnt matter.. though you will get an increase in mame... But youalso would have to running a 64 bit os and a 64bit compilied version..

[Visitor Q]

In general what do you recommend for that processor?

Jason

[joebells]

xp 32 or vista either flavor but I think I'm going to switch back to vista 32 from vista 64 as Im getting little problems/errors here and there that I never had on vista 32, it is a whole new machine also but I'm pretty sure its software related. I've read xp 64 isn't great especially in the driver department. If you are going the media center route, as in using it for movies and tv, definately go vista as the vista media center is great. We love ours

If you have 4 gigs of ram or more 64 is generally recomended also as 32 can't use it all and it can actually slow it down some in some instances.

[Visitor Q]

I was playing on running XP 32 with 4 gigs, is that bad? I know it will only see 3.5 but I did not think that was a big deal at this point...???

I thought some emu's will not even work under Vista?

Jason

[joebells]

depends on the motherboard(I believe the p5k-vm is one) and such but in some cases 4 gigs of ram and a 32bit version of windows can be worse than only having 3 gigs of ram. I think I might of ran into one or two that didn't but that was many months ago. If you are considering running the actual media center I highly recommend vista. Otherwise then I would just stick with xp.

[Visitor Q]

I am only running this as #1 and emualtor PC and then #2 a media center. I do not play on recording TV with it as I already own a DVR with DTV, however I do plan on using it to play music and watch DVDs.

Mobo is Asus Rampage.

Jason

[joebells]

don't really know anything about that mobo. Are you planning on ripping your dvd's to your hard drive and watching them that way? If so vista has a nice dvd library feature. We have a little over a hundred movies stored that way, we press the dvd menu button on our remote and all the dvd box pictures pop up and we just have to scroll and pick the movie we want and start it all from the remote, no getting up.

xp mce has something similar but not quite as nice. Depending on what dvr you have you might like vista media centers dvr better. The dvr we had we loved but then after trying vista media center we wouldn't want to go back. Its just much smarter.

[Circo]

All I know is dont cheap it on the motherboard or ram, I have built 3 systems with that proc and two are super solid at 3.8ghz. The cheap mobo and ram setup no oc at all.

[Visitor Q]

don't really know anything about that mobo. Are you planning on ripping your dvd's to your hard drive and watching them that way? If so vista has a nice dvd library feature. We have a little over a hundred movies stored that way, we press the dvd menu button on our remote and all the dvd box pictures pop up and we just have to scroll and pick the movie we want and start it all from the remote, no getting up.

xp mce has something similar but not quite as nice. Depending on what dvr you have you might like vista media centers dvr better. The dvr we had we loved but then after trying vista media center we wouldn't want to go back. Its just much smarter.

I was not planning on ripping DVDs to the drive.

My main concern with running Vista MC is this, that some Emualtors will not work with it. The main purpose of this PC is Emulation... I need to Emulate as many systems as possible, not just Mame.

Will Vista support all Emualtors?

Jason

ps. The very first Emu I check "freedo", WIN32 WIP 1.9. So does that mean XP only or no 64 bit versions?

[brian_hoffman]

I tested configs of all emulators using Vista... They all work.
BTW: For freedo you need to use my wrapper and it only works with version 1.6 because that version was the only one that worked well in vista.

[Visitor Q]

I tested configs of all emulators using Vista... They all work.
BTW: For freedo you need to use my wrapper and it only works with version 1.6 because that version was the only one that worked well in vista.

So... You are saying that all Emulators that you have used for all the different systems out there work with Vista? Maybe I should be thinking about Vista Media Center then...???

Jason

[brian_hoffman]

Im saying most emus work with vista... Al the HS ones do.

[Visitor Q]

Im saying most emus work with vista... Al the HS ones do.

Are we talking front ends here or the Emualtion programs themselves?

Jason

[brian_hoffman]

Emulators. and they're compatability with Vista.

[Visitor Q]

Emulators. and they're compatability with Vista.

Maybe it would be easier to ask this then, do you know of any or have you run into any that are not?

Jason

[brian_hoffman]

Yes.. The newwer freedo emus suck in vista... In Nulldc you have to adjust your sound buffer from 1024 to 2048 otherwise you get sound popping. Utilites like MSPformat dont work in vista.
Fraps doesnt like vista (video recording) I havent tried lowlevel driver like ppjoy (my hacked nes pad I made that goes through parellel port) Probably wont work.. For DOS games youll need to use DOSBOX... Nothing too bad... but xp is more compatable

[Visitor Q]

I think I will stick with XP for now.

Visita to me is a failed OS. MS already has plans to release a new system next year.

Jason

[joebells]

If you aren't going to use your media center for tv or for storing and playing dvd's then I agree just stick with xp. I don't know if I'd say failure but its definitely not fully baked. The release the new system next year is actually getting back into their more regular update cycle. Vista was just late, very late. Plus it'll probably get pushed back at least once.

If you ever get the itch to try out tv recording on the pc and/or movie storage definitely move up to vista its media center is awesome.

[Visitor Q]

Well I have a DVR with DTV already and my only complaint is limited recording space in HD. As far as DVD storage, I have well over 500 movies on DVD so to store just a few, not sure there is much point in that.

Jason

[joebells]

yeah 500 would take a couple of hard drives if you like to keep the whole movie like me. Alot of people whittle it down to just the movie and get rid of all the extra's and they can make it down to around 3 gigs or so. You can convert the movies and such to different formats and bring them down to around a gig or two depending on your want for quality(I want is as high quality as possible so I just leave mine original but I guess you can get pretty darn close to the original quality with some of the tools out there and save a crap load of space).

Man 500 movies on the hd and ready to watch at any time would be awesome. We have about 120 so far.

[Visitor Q]

yeah 500 would take a couple of hard drives if you like to keep the whole movie like me. Alot of people whittle it down to just the movie and get rid of all the extra's and they can make it down to around 3 gigs or so. You can convert the movies and such to different formats and bring them down to around a gig or two depending on your want for quality(I want is as high quality as possible so I just leave mine original but I guess you can get pretty darn close to the original quality with some of the tools out there and save a crap load of space).

Man 500 movies on the hd and ready to watch at any time would be awesome. We have about 120 so far.

Yeah... That would take close to two T drives too.

It's a neat idea but, that is a lot work and about 500 bucks to do it.

Jason

[joebells]

now I'm not trying to talk you into it, I'm really not, but if you look you can find 1 T drives for about 150 sometimes.

[BadBoyBill]

Well I have a DVR with DTV already and my only complaint is limited recording space in HD. As far as DVD storage, I have well over 500 movies on DVD so to store just a few, not sure there is much point in that.

Jason

Damn thats alot of movies, wish I had a selection like that, I'd be a couch potatoe.

[Ego-X]

depends on the motherboard(I believe the p5k-vm is one) and such but in some cases 4 gigs of ram and a 32bit version of windows can be worse than only having 3 gigs of ram. I think I might of ran into one or two that didn't but that was many months ago. If you are considering running the actual media center I highly recommend vista. Otherwise then I would just stick with xp.

You are right!

Basically the chipset needs to be higher than the usual 32bit, 36bit is becomming common on higher end boards.

It's all down to memory mapping, computers use a flat memory model, which has nothing to do with the amount of physical memory you have, took me ages to get what the memory hole was because I couldn't seperate memory addresses from physical memory in my head.

A typical system might be mapped like this....

Physical memory 0 - 3GB
Video card 3GB - 3.5GB
Sound card 3.5 - 3.6
and so on for every device in your comp.

You can see that with a 32 bit chipset it's impossible to map the last 1GB of physical memory on a 4GB system because the addresses are in use already.

There is an ini switch for XP that is designed to alleviate the problem but it very dependant on drivers behaving in a particular way, although milage various I don't really recommend it.

On the subject of 64bit my personal feeling and nothing more is that there are as many cons as pros currently to 64bit, we don't quite need it just yet.