Intel 82Q35 perfomance really horrible, limitation of the hardware?

[oliver]

Hi all,

I have an old ofice PC (HP dc7800) with a core 2 duo@3GHz and an 82q35 graphics chip in the northbridge. I don't think it has dedicated video memory so that is ontop of that. I added to the dc 7800 a "PCI-E x16 DVI Video Card Silicon orion" which is just a tmds encoder chip and DVI port.

Anyhow, performance is pretty bad with the limited tests I ran. I started with gnome-ubuntu (gnome-shell) and that was horrible slugish. The goal was to have a dedicated xbmc htpc. But xbmc ran at a framerate of 5-10 fps.

Trying xbmcuntu, which has no signs of compositing, it ran at 10-15 fps, but not stable, it would drop to 3-5 during heavy movement of the menu.

Anyway besdies adding a different videocard to improve performance?

[curaga]

It's a slow chip, it's barely faster than i945 if that says anything to you.

See http://www.tomsguide.com/us/intel-un...ew-689-17.html

[oliver]

It's a slow chip, it's barely faster than i945 if that says anything to you.

I understand it's a slow chip and I do not expect super high performance, but XBMC doesn't have huge requirements I would have though. Raspberry Pi is a very weak GPU is it not? The Q35 here appears to be even slower then that.

[ickle]

Hi all,

I have an old ofice PC (HP dc7800) with a core 2 duo@3GHz and an 82q35 graphics chip in the northbridge. I don't think it has dedicated video memory so that is ontop of that. I added to the dc 7800 a "PCI-E x16 DVI Video Card Silicon orion" which is just a tmds encoder chip and DVI port.

Anyhow, performance is pretty bad with the limited tests I ran. I started with gnome-ubuntu (gnome-shell) and that was horrible slugish. The goal was to have a dedicated xbmc htpc. But xbmc ran at a framerate of 5-10 fps.

Trying xbmcuntu, which has no signs of compositing, it ran at 10-15 fps, but not stable, it would drop to 3-5 during heavy movement of the menu.

Anyway besdies adding a different videocard to improve performance?

The q35 is basically a fixed-function OpenGL 1.4 device with a limited ability to perform small and simple fragment shaders and no hardware vertex shaders or other TnL. Trying to use almost anything GLSL-based is a recipe for disaster and software fallbacks. It is quite a powerful CPU though, and you pay for that in its power draw (even at idle) and cooling requirement - it would not make my shortlist for HTPC! As there is no better software to use, you definitely need a different GPU and I would recommend an alternate CPU and chassis.

[oliver]

The q35 is basically a fixed-function OpenGL 1.4 device with a limited ability to perform small and simple fragment shaders and no hardware vertex shaders or other TnL. Trying to use almost anything GLSL-based is a recipe for disaster and software fallbacks. It is quite a powerful CPU though, and you pay for that in its power draw (even at idle) and cooling requirement - it would not make my shortlist for HTPC! As there is no better software to use, you definitely need a different GPU and I would recommend an alternate CPU and chassis.

I wholeheartedly completely agree I changed the memory from DDR2-667 to DDR2-800 and that was an improvement of 5FPS. I've also ordered some open box asus ATI 6460 Radeon with UVD3 which is passivly cooled and was only 25 bux. Replacing the entire thing is not an option right now due to lack of funds My current aging HTPC is an Athlond 64 x2 (opteron actually) with AGP slots!! While power hungry too, its not on that much to be fair.

Then again, it may have been wiser to use those 25 against one really cheap all in 1 boards...

High power usage on IDLE is really interesting too, since at work; the building is filled with those and most just idle, day and night ...

But thanks for confirming that chipset + cpu is really really ... poor.