Best CPU for a General Purpose/ almost 24/7 HTPC build

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
S

silvacrest

Reputable
Oct 6, 2015
12
0
4,510
Hi, my current PC is being used as a school work, media consumption and general browsing CPU, my problem is this PC will be switched on most of the time so the CPU needs to be efficient plus it will have a dual monitor setup which will have (when im not doing work) media playing on Kodi + multiple chrome windows with at least two playing back twitch streams on source quality.

I need this to run without lag and with the most energy efficient CPU as possible, I've gone through a few CPUs to try and achieve this, im currently on a A8 7600, the plan there was to run it at 45w TDP, performance wasn't good enough, upped the TDP to 65w, it was better but slowed during the most intensive tasks that i already mentioned

money is somewhat of a factor, i would like to spend £120 or less but i have no issues buying used components, I've seen a used i5 3330s but not sure if that would do the trick, so any recommendations are welcome
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
S

silvacrest

Reputable
Oct 6, 2015
12
0
4,510
Hardware acceleration was already on, didn't even realise but thanks for the suggestion.
And to clarify, im only getting slow down when playing back media on kodi + running a twitch stream on source quality and yes, i know its weird to have both running at once but that is my settup
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Z

ZENprime

Reputable
Jul 2, 2015
503
1
5,360


No it is not weird , many people stream + playback a video at the same time
But they use hardware decoding to make the GPU play the video so CPU can put all it's power on streaming

Can I ask for CPU usage with hardware acceleration ON/OFF during only playing a video on a monitor ?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
S

silvacrest

Reputable
Oct 6, 2015
12
0
4,510
Okay, i havn't met anyone else who does this, cpu usage with hardware acceleration and with kodi peaked at 4.3%, with about 30 chrome tabs open and some minor services and applications running, total CPU usage peaked at 28%

kodi CPU usage with hardware acceleration off is 15% at max total cpu usage peaked at 44%

all these results a from me playing back a 720p video

I also looked at usage with kodi and twich playing, no suprice that its at 100% and that's just with one stream running
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Z

ZENprime

Reputable
Jul 2, 2015
503
1
5,360

It is probably an issue with flash , when watching an online stream with flash the CPU gets heavy load , no matter what model it is , the flash is really heavy in online videos .
Can you use firefox for streaming ?
if it still has high load , you would need to watch streams using Livestreamer + VLC
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1o5n68/how_to_watch_twitch_through_vlc/
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
S

silvacrest

Reputable
Oct 6, 2015
12
0
4,510
I have tried VLC + livestreamer, while that does work i still face two problems, first, if a twitch stream goes down in a browser the stream will automatically come back once the streamer is back online, vlc + livestreamer can't do this, i would have to reopen it every single time it went down, plus i do use the twitch chat (just to read not type) which i would have to scale in relation to the vlc window when using popout chat. This process overall is not to bad, just annoying compared to opening two twitch tabs in a browser.

Second, with 2 VLC streams running at source quality + kodi i still get slow down, and that's system slow down and general web browsing slow down
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom