So after just building a computer with a Haswell I am super impressed with the very low power consumption at idle since the i5 was running about 37 watts before the graphics card got plugged in. I already have a media center computer built, but its running a power hungry Athlon X4. Since its purpose is media center it is an always on device for me since its can be running DVR in the background and the cost savings of a Haswell starts to work out in the long term if a cheap one is good enough.
So for something that needs to DVR two programs at once, comfortably play 1080p video from a compressed format, what would work? Is the Intel Pentium G3220 really going to be strong enough for that purpose? The DVR is working from a Silicon dust HD home, so it doesn't need to do video processing. So much info out there is really about the high end, so just looking for some info if this is good enough. If I need an i3 or i5, that would be a more difficult decision since the payoff in engery saving would be way off.
So for something that needs to DVR two programs at once, comfortably play 1080p video from a compressed format, what would work? Is the Intel Pentium G3220 really going to be strong enough for that purpose? The DVR is working from a Silicon dust HD home, so it doesn't need to do video processing. So much info out there is really about the high end, so just looking for some info if this is good enough. If I need an i3 or i5, that would be a more difficult decision since the payoff in engery saving would be way off.