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[Hilton]

The TiVo 1TB expansion disk died and TiVo has been hanging a lot lately, possible because of the dying Hard disk; so now it's time to retire TiVo, be brave and promote MC to full-time TV duties in the lounge room.

Fortunately the Wife has had a few years getting used to MC theatre and standard view so it shouldn't be too traumatic as long as I map all the MC TV recording and playback controls to the remote! (and make it work with the TiVo remote.)
That's actually a bigger job than it sounds because not even I've explored all the key mapping opportunities for TV on MC!

I already have a reasonably beefy HTPC/Server that's had 3 tuners in it for about 6 months that records just the stuff that's important to me in the theatre room, and it's been pretty stable but suffering occasional lockups. I've been too busy lately to check on the crash logs but I guess I better start at least submitting them!

The main HTPC/Server doesn't seem to have any trouble with being the main media server, transcoding, watching a movie and running 3 tuners, but it's an i7 4770 3.9Ghz Quad core Haswell processor with a Asus GTX760 DirectCU II 2GB GPU with 15TB of esata RAID. It's reasonably quiet because it's water cooled with a H75.

The Lenovo i5 3470T Tiny PC has served well as a lounge media player too but the CPU fan is on the fritz again, so I'm thinking of getting a current i5 NUC with 4 external USB TV tuners and an external 4TB RAID box but am concerned it wont have enough power to record 4 shows and allow watching a recorded show at the same time.

Is the 2xCore i5 4250U/5250U in the NUC fast enough or should I just clean up the 2xCore i5 3470T again? Will the 3470T even have enough grunt for the job?

The newer i5 4250U/5250U in the NUC has a significantly lower clock speed but they're newer than old lounge PC and has the HD5000/HD6000 GPU compared with the old HD2500.
Does the CPU or GPU make a lot of difference for multi-tuner recording?

I think the NUC i5 is also due for another refresh with the new CPU/GPU in the next 2-3 months too. (take it back just checked and the i3 is in stock and the i5 5250u will be soon)

Should I even be considering the NUC or Lenovo for a quad tuner setup or should I just build another i7?
What are other people running successfully with Quad tuner setups?

Lots of questions I know, but I searched and couldn't find much on Quad tuner setups in the forums.
I'm ok with RO standard in the lounge as its only a 46" TV.
Thanks for any input and advice!

Old vs New
Lenovo i5 3470T @ 2.9Ghz turbo up to 3.5Ghz ----- vs ----- NUC i5 4250U 1.3Ghz turbo up to 2.6Ghz ----- vs ----- NUC i5 5250U 1.6Ghz turbo up to 2.7Ghz
                  Intel HD2500 ---------------------------- vs --------------- Intel HD5000 -------------------------- vs ---------------------- HD6000

8GB Ram vs same
Sandisk Extreme 120GB SSD vs same
Windows 7 64bit Pro vs Windows 8.1 Pro

Old Lenovo i5 3470T Lounge PC JRMarks.
=== Running Benchmarks (please do not interrupt) ===

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 3.778 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 2.512 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 2.151 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 1.473 seconds
Score: 1917

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 0.196 seconds
    Flood filling... 0.376 seconds
    Direct copying... 0.468 seconds
    Small renders... 1.081 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 1.257 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 1.203 seconds
Score: 4802

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 0.383 seconds
    Populate database... 1.110 seconds
    Save database... 0.148 seconds
    Reload database... 0.035 seconds
    Search database... 1.018 seconds
    Sort database... 0.936 seconds
    Group database... 0.642 seconds
Score: 5033

JRMark (version 18.0.112): 3917

[mwillems]

I can't comment on your proposed tuner setup (I just run a three-tuner ethernet box), but I do have an i5 4250U NUC; its JRMark is lower than your 3470T (the final number is in the high 2ks or low 3ks depending on the day).  The new i5 NUCs will only be incrementally faster. 

You're probably better off refitting the lenovo;  I have a sandy bridge i7 that benches in the low 4000's.  To do better than your lenovo, you'd need a modern desktop i7 (not the new i7 NUC, which will be thermally limited). 

[Hilton]

I can't comment on your proposed tuner setup (I just run a three-tuner ethernet box), but I do have an i5 4250U NUC; its JRMark is lower than your 3470T (the final number is in the high 2ks or low 3ks depending on the day).  The new i5 NUCs will only be incrementally faster.  

You're probably better off refitting the lenovo;  I have a sandy bridge i7 that benches in the low 4000's.  To do better than your lenovo, you'd need a modern desktop i7 (not the new i7 NUC, which will be thermally limited).  

Thanks for the feedback.

I've researched the crap out of stuff tonight and have come up with a few different possible configs:
2 x NUCs and 2 x mini-ITX configs which are each as similar as possible.

It's hard not to like the i5 4460 mini ITX config in a nice small attractive HTPC case and only a few bucks more than the i5 NUC.  I like to build systems anyway and it's upgradable.

However the NUC is certainly less intrusive, more portable, almost as powerful for what I need and will probably do everything I would ask of it.

What are your thoughts on the i5 NUC?

List


i5 4250U NUC is the second most expensive and the second fastest -but a fair bit slower than the i5 4460 mini-ITX


i5 4460 mini-ITX HTPC - Fastest by quite a bit, most flexible and only $42 more than the i5 NUC


J2900 mini-ITX HTPC - Second slowest and only marginally faster the N2820 NUC but also only $87 more than the N2820


N2820 NUC - Slowest. I currently have this running as my lounge HTPC while my Lenovo Tiny PC is out for a cleanup. For the most part it handles all video pretty well. Netflix in HD is a bit jittery at times but that's also the case at times on most of my other systems with netflix, it's just a little more noticeable on the N2820. Mind you the wife doesn't see the difference!  

[mwillems]

I only have two notes to offer: 

1) Where I am amazon is selling the i5 NUC for $350; you might be able to do better than a $450 price tag
2) I used the intel 7260AC in mine as well, and it gave me no end of grief.  I probably wouldn't have bought it again if I'd known what I was in for.  The drivers are better now, but there's still an unresolved issue where the wifi adapter fails when the computer returns from sleep (about every third sleep cycle), which requires manually turning it off and then back on.  If you check on Intel's forums, the issue is pretty widespread.  The good news is that the NUC will turn on from the IR control even when it's "off,"  so I don't bother putting it to sleep, I just turn it off when not in use and use the remote to wake it up.

[Hilton]

Thanks for the tips.

I'll rebuild the Lenovo to windows 8.1 after I've cleaned all the gunk out of it again and throw 4 USB tuners on it to see how it copes before I spend the money on another box.
Is there any reason I shouldn't consider giving Win 10 a run?

[JimH]

Thanks for the tips.

I'll rebuild the Lenovo to windows 8.1 after I've cleaned all the gunk out of it again and throw 4 USB tuners on it to see how it copes before I spend the money on another box.
Is there any reason I shouldn't consider giving Win 10 a run?

I haven't seen problems reported with it.  glynor loaded it about 10 days ago and posted something brief.

[rudyrednose]

Greetings,
I do not understand why you are not hooking up all your tuners to the server.
I use OTA ATSC from 6 tuners (3 dual tuners HDHomeRun) and it is always through the MC server (that is on 24/7) that the HTPCs access TV.
Works well!

[Hilton]

Greetings,
I do not understand why you are not hooking up all your tuners to the server.
I use OTA ATSC from 6 tuners (3 dual tuners HDHomeRun) and it is always through the MC server (that is on 24/7) that the HTPCs access TV.
Works well!

Hi thanks for the reminder.
I've tried to make use of this and it works ok for occasional casual use but the channel change is a bit slow and local tuner changes are a bit quicker.  It also means I would need to run a few more tuners on the server to prevent conflict with what my daughter and wife want to record/watch and I'm not sure how the server would go with 8 tuners in it.