On Wed, 13 Apr 2016 13:24:59 +0100 Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk allegedly wrote:
I'm looking to replace my home desktop PC (Ubuntu) with something a bit better. Budget around £4-500.
Mark
About a month ago I bought a new Zoostorm i7 from ebuyer. (One of these : http://www.ebuyer.com/735874-zoostorm-desktop-pc-7260-3047). I paid £20 more than the current price too...
The machine is good value, and blindingly fast compared to my old second gen i3. It is also very, vey quiet. I added a 120 Gig SSD to hold the OS only so it boots very quickly.
Like you, I do a lot of transcoding, but not on the fly. I have a lot of DVDS that I have ripped over the years when I was commuting daily to London (I used to watch them on a PSP would you believe). Now that I only watch the videos on my PC, or tablet (or on the home TV) of course the resolution at which I originally ripped the DVDs is way too low. So I am re-ripping. Now a rip of a DVD with handbrake takes typically 10-15 minutes to get a 1.5 Gb MP4 file (encoded with x264) that looks good on a 48" TV.
But:
The downside is that the on-board graphics chip is crap. It simply cannot cope with playback (using VLC) of even the lower resolution files I have stored at the moment. I have now resorted to re-using the old Nvidia GeForce GT220 from my old i3 so that I get decent performance. But that seems to have killed the transcoding performance because it now takes around 25-30 minutes (what I used to see on the i3) to rip a DVD. I think this is weird and I must be wrong here because everything I can find about handbrake says that it /doesn't/ use the GPU for transcoding (except in certain circumstances and on windows only)
See https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/GPUAcceleration and references to handbrake in http://www.extremetech.com/computing/128681-the-wretched-state-of-gpu-transc...
What I really need to do is some direct comparisons of ripping the same DVD with and without the Nividia card in place before I invest in a more up to date GPU.
Which brings me to the next bad point about the PC - the PSU (at 250 watts) is way too underspecced to handle the addition of a decent GPU (or even too many disks).
On balance though, given that you get a skylake i7 and 16 Gig of DDR4, I'd say that the Zoostorm was a bargain.
Mick
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