Yeah but:

- The Northwood socket 478 chips go up to 3.2Ghz (3.4 if you're willing to shell out for the EE chips ) and 3.2 is fast enough for HDTV. Pushing the i865 chipset much beyond 3.4 is a stretch so you'd probably have to replace the board to upgrade the CPU very much anyway.

- The Northwoods run substantially cooler and perform better at the same clock rate compared to the Prescotts.

- The Athlon 64 looks like the real path forward and some of them are already VERY zippy. Frankly we're running out usable MHz unless we get faster electrons or something, going to smaller feature sizes has gotten problematic (witness the ugly thermal density issues everyone is having with the 90micron processes), and the chip makers are starting to go wider rather than faster as a result: 32->64 bits, single -> multi core chips, ...

ok..with my recent purchase of the HD3000, I am looking also to upgrade my CPU (and maybe mobo) to handle the HD television. I was thinking about getting the AthXP 2800+ and OC it to 3200+ (I done it on my other shuttle PC). Do you guys think 3200+ can handle decoding HD mpeg2? or should I really go with P4 HT?

You REALLY need to search the archives here and on Gossamer for this info. Here's my take on HDTV and Athlon -- enjoy.

HDTV on Myth -- is it a "myth?"
HDTV on Myth -- isi it a "myth?" -- CONCLUSION

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Athlon 64 MoBos... These two look pretty sweet... Kind of a premium price for a HTPC or Set Top Box once you get a decent CPU in there (>$300 for just the CPU and MoBo), but these definitely should have plenty of bandwidth for HDTV applications. OBTW - Both have SPDIF support too.

http://www.epox.com/USA/product.asp?id=EP-9NDA3plus

Their info on memory compatibily is a bit hard to dig out, they don't even seem to have their manuals available on line for this board yet...

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=K8N_Neo2_Platinum&class=mb

Who the heck needs dual Gb ethernet for a HTPC? Of course support for 4 PATA and 4 SATA drives...

Re: AMD64 and KnoppMyth...

Any idea what is needed to make this fly? Can you just treat the AMD64 like a big ol' Athlon, close your eyes, and have everything just install and work? It seemed unlikely to me, and I couldn't find much info on myth and AMD64.

I actually HAD the MSI Neo2 board in my hands, with AMD64 3200 processor. But I was tired of installing and reinstalling at that moment so I punted and traded it for a P4 board. After the threads on myth-user it was clear that few of the HDTV developers were using AMD processors and I was just tried of being "pioneer". I thought XvMC was a done deal until I tried it and then asked on myth-user. It turns out the path to a good-working HDTV box is very narrow at this moment.

The price of the AMD64/Neo2 was a little more than the P4/Abit board I wound up with (both were "3200" fwiw). I think it was $270 vs. $250 for the "Fry's weekend special" combo.

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I don't see why you couldn't treat an a64 just like an athlon or pentium, as it will run 32 bit x86 code natively. only place you might run into problems is the chipset support, as it is so new.

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Xsecrets

The word on the street is that you can. You can also recompile anything speed crittical to take advantage of the 64 bit processor, but it's not necessary. Search for AMD 64 over on http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/ and you should find several threads. Mostly on compilation issues from people trying to optimize their performance. Frankly I'd worry more about support for the chipset as Xsecrets said...

For normal NTSC purposes the AMD 64 is grotesque overkill, but by all reports decoding HDTV is far more processor intensive that I'd have expected, which a factor of about 4x. Instead it seems to be about a factor of 12-16x harder...