17Logo AMD Vision Fusion premiumNovo HTPC - Asus E35M1 ‑ M Pro (AMD Fusion)

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Eu acabei de atualizar meu HTPC - ou melhor, classificá-lo de um Pentium DualCore para um Asus E35M1-M Pro. Abaixo, documentarei meus pensamentos enquanto dou ao sistema um treino completo

23-Poderia: Ini­tial thoughts

  • UEFI is nice — altho it does­n’t really offer any­thing imme­di­ate that the old BIOS did­n’t (exceto >2TB boot drives of course)
  • The UEFI screen did­n’t dis­play prop­erly on my 720p Sam­sung CRT TV — it was rather dys­func­tion­al. It worked fine on my 24″ 1920×1200 HP zr24w
  • The combo PS2 port wont work with my old PS2 keyboard
  • The sys­tem seems to run com­pletely fan­less without any prob­lem. I don’t yet know if play­ing some HD films will need act­ive cooling
  • I like hav­ing USB3 ports on such a cheap system
  • I don’t like the lack of ana­logue audio out­puts — there are only 3 sock­ets on the back-panel
  • The sys­tem was con­sid­er­ably faster than I was expect­ing — not notice­ably dif­fer­ent from the 2.8GHz Pen­ti­um Dual­Core E6300 (impress­ive for an 18W 1.6GHz dual-core chip).  I sus­pect this is partly down to being a fresh install, partly down to hav­ing 4Gb rather than 2Gb of memory, and finally hav­ing a faster HDD (Seag­ate Momentus XT rather than 5,400rpm 3.5″ eco desktop drive)
  • The included Asus soft­ware isn’t flex­ible enough for fan con­trol. Instead I recom­mend Speed-Fan which offers full speed control.
  • The over­clock­ing fea­ture over­clocked my CPU from 1600MHz to 1640MHz. The 2.5% seems pretty point­less to me.

26-Poderia: Atualizar 1

  • I have had a prob­lem with standby — but I think it is caused by either hybrid-standby mode, or by prob­lems with my Pin­nacle 3010ix freeview tuner. Hope­fully I’ll be able to update soon to con­firm my sus­pi­cions. When I even­tu­ally upgrade to a Black­gold BGT3620
  • I’ve had a recur­rence of a prob­lem play­ing back a BluRay rip of Inglori­ous Bas­terds. This has always been a very chal­len­ging movie to play, and I think the prob­lem is a codec issue. Again, I’ll hope­fully be able to update soon con­firm­ing the fix.
  • Oth­er­wise the sys­tem is work­ing really well. I’m still very pleased with the per­form­ance. Run­ning the sys­tem fan­less most of the time, with a couple of low-speed case fans activ­ated by speed­fan when needed

30-Poderia: Atualizar 2

  • As expec­ted, dis­abling hybrid sleep has resolved the prob­lem with not wak­ing from sleep. The PC isn’t stay­ing asleep at the moment, but I’ve had this issue before, its being woken by the net­work I think — pos­sible due to my enabling HomeGroup. I have no need for WOL so I’ll be turn­ing it off in device man­ager. I haven’t yet looked at resolv­ing the play­back of Inglori­ous Bas­terds, mas novamente, its a prob­lem I’ve had before. This time when I solve it I’ll doc­u­ment it!

11-Aug: Atualizar 3

  • The sleep issues are fully resolved. Partly this was related to issues with the [int­link id=“1505” type=“post”]Seagate Momentus XT which I’ve doc­u­mented in a dif­fer­ent article[/intlink].  The short ver­sion — if you have a Momentus XT then dis­able HDD sleep and update the drive firm­ware. The play­back issues with some h.264 have also been resolved — the new­er ver­sions of ffd­show DXVA aren’t work­ing very well, going back to an older ver­sion has cleared this issue. Finally, Eu tenho, after some ini­tial issues, tested the use of a TV Card in the PCI-E x16 slot suc­cess­fully!  I am now using a sys­tem with 3 TV cards with great success!

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17 Comments

EuIan

Oi jon,

no sys­tem as yet! That‘s why i ask. I am toy­ing with the idea of a Zacate E‑450 or known overkill of an Asus P8H67 Evo with a 2100T CPU. I am the type of per­son who if he feels that he cant have the crunch­ing power he needs from one machine just steps up to an overkill machine. Prob­lem is get­ting rid of the heat. I am hav­ing an exchange on the avfor­ums about the same sub­ject. So far you are the only per­son who has tried the BGT3620 with a Zacate and repor­ted on its per­form­ance. I thought It would do the job. Se CPU burbles along at 2% para 6% then I cant see a prob­lem hav­ing the Zacate play­ing a mon­ster bitrate mkv file while record­ing the telly. I know that the i3 chip will be idling most of the time so there­fore the heat issue will be slight but I loathe exper­i­ment­ing with fans. I am itch­ing to get this box built up as i have a few movies as BD rips that I want to view on free time over christ­mas. I have a BGT3620, a spare Cru­cial M4 boot­drive and a WD Scor­pio Blue 1TB drive. A power brick from an indus­tri­al con­trol­ler that will do nicely for power. Just the nag­ging choice of which hard­ware plat­form and which grossly over­priced case. As long as the case does not rattle from any fit­ted fan I am not fussed. This lot will live in a 300 year old house with an interi­or that I shall describe as “old fash­ioned” so no AV racks or glass. £50 for a case would be nice but I know that is idle fancy. You have cer­tainly awakened my interest in a Zacate. I hate to see wasted resources and of course I would be dis­ap­poin­ted if the thing struggled to work.

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

I’m con­fid­ent the E450 will be more than enough. Except for an issue with some recent-ish builds of ffd­show x64 with DXVA which seem a bit glitchy and play­ing back inter­laced VC‑1 (which is pretty rare) I’ve had no prob­lems with play­back or record­ing of any­thing. I can­’t see why there would be any issues either — all the hard­ware has suf­fi­cient band­width, and record­ing TV isn’t a CPU intens­ive oper­a­tion — its just dump­ing the stream into a con­tain­er on the disk as far as I can tell — the down­side is rather large recor­ded files, but the upside is low power sys­tems can do it eas­ily. The E350 is excep­tion­ally low powered com­pared to any­thing else I’ve got or had. I only have 1 fan in my HTPC and thats a very quiet 120mm case fan which is con­trolled by speed­fan. I know it spins (rather loudly) if I reboot the sys­tem, but oth­er than that I’ve nev­er noticed it, altho I am typ­ic­ally 10ft from the PC. I sus­pect it very rarely spins up — it’s there more for peace of mind than cooling 🙂

Resposta
EuIan

Can you con­firm the per­form­ance and oper­a­tion of the BGT3620 Dual DVB-T2 card in the PCI-E x1 slot? Will it record two chan­nels at once and what sort of CPU load do you see if/when it does?

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

It per­forms great. I’ve had it in both my E350 sys­tem, and now in my media serv­er (which is a much more hefty Core i5 2400). I’ve had it record 2 HD streams sim­ul­tan­eously without any prob­lems. I’m not aware of any HD con­tent exceed­ing 40MBps, and I believe BBC HD (por exemplo) is capped at 15MBps. Assum­ing the abso­lute max­im­um of 40MBps, record­ing 2 chan­nels wont exceed 80MBps. A first gen­er­a­tion 1x PCI-E slot can take 250MBps — 3 times the max­im­um required. I’m sure if there was any issue at all dual cards would­n’t have been released in PCI-E 1x con­fig­ur­a­tions. Como isso é, even a quad-tuner wont sat­ur­ate a PCI-E 1x slot. Real­ist­ic­ally, if you wanted to record 4 HD chan­nels sim­ul­tan­eously, you’d need maybe 80MBps abso­lute max. Both PCI-E 1x, SATA 1 and any mod­ern HDD can provide the required band­width. In my scen­ario, com um TV serv­er send­ing the sig­nal out over eth­er­net, I still wont reach sat­ur­a­tion for a while. Eth­er­net is often only around 10% effi­cient — but even at that I can stream at least 5 dif­fer­ent HD chan­nels simultaneously.

In terms of CPU uso, I’ve nev­er mon­itored it. I’ve had no prob­lem record­ing 2 chan­nels, and play­ing back anoth­er sim­ul­tan­eously, even on the E350 sys­tem. A very curs­ory look, whilst record­ing BBC HD and ITV HD — it looks like I get a peak of 2% CPU usage for the record­ing ser­vice (ehrecvr in task man­ager) on the Core i5 2400.

What sys­tem are you using?

Resposta
UMAAdão

This mobo, a decent sized SSD and a couple of the new BGT3630 cards is my ulti­mate HTPC instalação.
Do you know wheth­er the 16x PCI-E slot sup­ports cards which aren’t graph­ics cards?

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

Sim, sounds about the same as my ideal. Altho I con­cluded a big-enuf SSD is way too expens­ive, and the Seag­ate Momentus XT has worked well. Totally silent from a sit­ting dis­tance (I have it sus­pen­ded with bun­gee cord). I’m not cer­tain if the PCI-E slots sup­port oth­er cards, but I can­’t think of any reas­on why not. I’ll double check in the next couple of days.
Its a shame there is no way to get more than 1 PCI-E card onto a Mini-ITX board — then mini-ITX would make for the ideal solu­tion. I’m still look­ing for breakout/riser cards that might do the trick, but no luck so far.

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UMAAdão

What we need are a few more dtx motherboards.
That way dual PCIe tuner cards are more than with­in our grasp… and there are a few tiny HTPC cases that sup­port two add-in slots.

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

Acordado, but it does­n’t seem to be hap­pen­ing. AMD launched DTX 4.5 years ago — and still no sign of any­thing. If they were still inter­ested you’d think they would have pushed Fusion sys­tems that way — maybe with a ref­er­ence board.

Além disso, I’ve decided that a BGT3620 and a BGT3595 will be a slightly bet­ter solu­tion than 2 BGT3630’s. They’re avail­able now, and provide the same fea­tures — 4 sim­ul­tan­eous HD tuners (twin DVB-S2, twin-DVB-T2). Addi­tion­ally — in my case I have moved house and the new house does­n’t yet have a sat dish, so get­ting this solu­tion will provide me with a total of 4 tuners imme­di­ately (2 DVB-T2, 2 só DVB-T) wheras 2 BGT3630’s would only provide me twin DVB-T2 tuners (with no bonus DVB-Sintonizadores T).

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

I have now tried a TV card in the 16x PCI-E slot. No go. Sys­tem just did­n’t see it. Very dis­ap­point­ing! You’d think on a plat­form with a pretty decent onboard GPU they’d anti­cip­ate people want­ing to use the 16x slot for oth­er types of card. I’ll be get­ting in touch with Asus to see if there is any­thing (bios update?) they can do to fix it. It may be a hard­ware lim­it­a­tion though. It would be inter­est­ing to know if oth­er Fusion boards have the same limitation

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

I’ve now e‑mailed Asus with the following…

Dear Sir/Madam,
I have an E35M1‑M Pro mother­board based on the new AMD E350 sys­tem. The board has 2 PCI-Express slots, a 1x and a 16x. I would like to use both for expan­sion cards, but neither card is a video card. The 1x slot works fine, but the 16x slot seems to only accept video cards. The 16x slot does work fine with a video card, but does not work with either of my TV cartões. When a TV card is put in the 16x the sys­tem boots up fine, but the card isn’t detec­ted by Win­dows. Can this issue be addressed in a future update to the BIOS/UEFI?
Muito obrigado,
Jon Scaife

Depend­ing on what I get back I might e‑mail Anand or Toms (or oth­ers) to see if any­one is inter­ested in run­ning a story on this and doc­u­ment­ing some of the boards or sys­tems that are let­ting us down. There should­n’t be some PCI-E slots that don’t work with some PCI-E cards — what’s the point of stand­ards if that happens?

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

Asus replied, say­ing that the PCI-E x16 slot SHOULD work with oth­er cards.
I swapped some cards around and hey presto — it did indeed work. I’ve no idea why it did­n’t work before, maybe the card was­n’t seated prop­erly, or the con­tacts wer­en’t clean maybe? Anyway, Não sei por que você não está recebendo acesso duplo, it DOES work!

Resposta
DDust64

Do you mind telling us HOW you got the TV Tuner to work in the x1 slot? I have been strug­gling with the same prob­lem on the same board for over a week now (mul­tiple emails to ASUS tech sup­port and all replies have been less than helpful). 

Which ver­sion of the BIOS are you using and with what settings?

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

Do you mean in the x16 slot? I just took the card out of the x1 slot, dropped it into the x16 slot and booted. Win­dows found the hard­ware and I was about to retune in Media Cen­ter. Just to be doubly sure I then dropped anoth­er card into the x1 slot (so I had a tuner in both x1 and x16 slots) and man­aged to tune them both OK. I won­der if the prob­lem is related to the make of tuner? Last time I tried I put a Pin­nacle 3010ix in the x16 slot which did­n’t work. This time I put my Black­Gold 3620 in the x16 slot and the 3010ix in the x1 slot. I’m using the most recent BIOS — 1002

Resposta
DDust64

Thanks for your reply, and sorry — I did mean the 16x slot.

I have not been able to make the board recog­nise the tuner (which is a Dvico Fusion­HDTV Dual Express) when placed in the 16x slot. unfor­tu­nately I don’t have anoth­er tuner to exper­i­ment with at the moment. My reas­ons for want­ing to use the 16x slot relate to case lim­it­a­tions rather than installing mul­tiple tuners.

Resposta
JSJon Scaife

I did at one point put a PCI-E x16 GPU into the x16 slot, and when I did I may have tinkered with the BIOS set­ting which con­trols if the onboard gpu is auto, forced, etc. Have you had a GPU in the x16 slot at all? Have you tried tinker­ing with the onboard video BIOS defini-ções? Assum­ing you’re on the latest BIOS ver­sion I’d expect it to be pos­sible to get it work­ing. I ordered a board as soon as they were on sale in the Reino Unido so I’m con­fid­ent I have first gen­er­a­tion hardware.
If you’re still not get­ting any­where after try­ing those give me anoth­er shout, I’ll retry with mine and can post my pre­cise BIOS defini-ções. I can also retry the Pin­nacle card

Resposta
DDust64

I was pretty sure I tried every pos­sible BIOS set­ting… In the end I got it work­ing with a dif­fer­ent brand of card (Digit­al­Now — an Aus­trali­an vendor). Obrigado pela ajuda.

Resposta
SSSimonty

Sounds like things are work­ing out pretty well over­all. That is a bit of a lame over­clock, but then it’s for watch­ing films on, not play­ing Quake-derivatives!

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