Celeron J1800 Bay Trail processor in-home Streaming Box?

[UnkendTech]

i been seeing that the new intel Bay Trail chips, and, boards may end up being around $60 US is this thing ends up Steaming games well, this will make a killer HTPC, by the time you buy RAM, a case, a power supply, and a cheap hard drive, or SSD, it will end up being a sub 200$ HTPC.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/gigabyte-ga-j1800-d2h-motherboard-celeron,25942.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7737/10w-bay-traild-coming-to-market-from-gigabyte-and-biostar
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4881#ov

[Reala]

Asus has an upcoming Eeebox (EB1037) with a J1900 and GT820M. Should be of great interest if the price is right, but I have no idea how they have historically listed these things. Perhaps all the Chromeboxes coming out will pressure the prices down. As an aside, will it be possible to install other OS on Chromeboxes? Some of them are going to be crazy affordable.

[Rapid Fire]

I'm interested in the j1800 too. I'd be glad, if some owners would share their experience with in-home streaming. I think the J1900 without an additional grafic chip isn't the better choise, because of the lower base clock and streaming shouldn't work better with 4 threads!?

I wonder rather, if the graphic solution is sufficient to handle streaming satisfactory.
My current device with a 4500MHD is slightly to weak. Eighter I have tearing (probably because of the Win7 Aero-Bug) or I have significant frame loss (because of the excessive demand while using in-home streaming simultaneous with Aero-desktop).

[pr0ph3t]

Tested j1800 and j1900 in my lab as streaming boxes. With H/W encoding enabled, they both do perfectly fine streaming everything from Dust to Left4Dead.

[Rapid Fire]

Thank you for your answer. Can you tell me which OS you used? As already mentioned I have a Win7 client PC and without windows aero I noticed substantial tearing. (In another thread I could read that enabling aero avoid tearing paradoxically)
Is the j1800 even strong enough to handle aero and streaming?

[pr0ph3t]

I tested for the J1800 and J1900 using the Steam client on Windows 8.1. I had problems with installing Steam OS. I'll be working on that and see if I can (or Vavle does) fix it.

[UnkendTech]

Originally posted by jprophet:

I tested for the J1800 and J1900 using the Steam client on Windows 8.1. I had problems with installing Steam OS. I'll be working on that and see if I can (or Vavle does) fix it.

can you try a base Linux like Arch?

[Rapid Fire]

I'd realy like to see the j1800 while streaming. Could someone post a screenshot, please? Ideal would be 1080p/60fps/15MBit. The notebook of my brother performed very well with an i3-3217u (probably through quicksync decoding): The red and the blue line stick together all along very closely and the quality was grandiose. That impressed me much and I'd like to see this with the j1800 too. Maybe a screenshot of the CPU utilization is also helpful.

Furthermore I'd like to know how fluent the Big Picture Mode performs with the Bay-Trail Graphics and if BP influences the performance of streaming.

[powerarmour]

I'm currently using the Gigabyte GA-J1800N-D2H as a streaming client running Win8.1 and running the latest 10.18.10.3496 drivers.

Have to say it performs beautifully, even BPM isn't too laggy either, but once in-stream it's as smooth as butter.

[Rapid Fire]

Thank you for response. Apart from IHS, Does someone use amazon instant video or watchever, which use microsoft silverlight? I've read a test, which came to the result, that the j1800 is slightly to weak for silverlight + 1080p (FullHD). Could someone confirm this?

I guess, even if the CPU is to slow, it won't affect me, because of my slow 2Mbit internet connection. So I probably wouldn't receive a 1080p-stream with a high bitrate!? Is it not true that the server detects the bandwith to adapt the quality of streaming?

[powerarmour]

Originally posted by Rapid Fire:

Thank you for response. Apart from IHS, Does someone use amazon instant video or watchever, which use microsoft silverlight? I've read a test, which came to the result, that the j1800 is slightly to weak for silverlight + 1080p (FullHD). Could someone confirm this?

I guess, even if the CPU is to slow, it won't affect me, because of my slow 2Mbit internet connection. So I probably wouldn't receive a 1080p-stream with a high bitrate!? Is it not true that the server detects the bandwidth to adapt the quality of streaming?

It's not really about the CPU, the Intel HD IGP in the BayTrail J1800 contains QuickSync hardware also, so there should be no issues encoding/decoding video.

It can even playback/decode 4K video (just like it's bigger IvyBridge brothers), so if it can handle that, it should have no issues whatsoever with 1080p, and if it does, it'll certainly be a driver/app issue.

[Rapid Fire]

I'm not so sure about this. This is a -->Link[computerbase.de]<-- (scroll down) to the mentioned test from a german pc website. It shows the utilization of some Kabini and Bay-Trail CPUs. They write that only the quadcore Bay-Trail J1900 performs well with watchever and that this occur because of the high CPU-requirements of MS silverlight... On that account I ask for watchever/AIV.

[powerarmour]

Well I'd assume that's an issue with Silverlight not taking advantage of the video hardware, MS should be looking to improve that, if that's the case.

Any regular H.264 streaming/decoding shouldn't have issues in theory. And although I don't use Silverlight, I haven't found any problems with anything else myself.

[ajgaming]

Hi guys, did anyone test streaming on a J1800 with the latest updates of Steam? I'd really would like to know if it will handle 1080p/60FPS with an high bitrate as 60/70Mbit. Any information is greatly appreciated!

[Rapid Fire]

Why you strive for such a high bitrate? I don't know your client system, but in my opinion there is no need for an bitrate higher than 20-30 Mbit! The quality differences are marginal and even on high end clients there will be an unpleasant latency with this high bitrate. Apart from this I use a J1900 and overall it works fine for streaming. The CPU power is relatively irrelevant If you use hardware decoding. So even a J1800 would fulfill your target, but don't hope for using your desired bitrate!

[ajgaming]

Thanks for the prompt reply! So why I asked is because I'm looking into building a dedicated Streaming Mini-ITX client for games in the bedroom. I tested it with my work laptop (an i5 CPU) and when I used the unlimited bandwith option I very much liked the quality (bandwith usage was around 60Mbit) and latency was really low, streaming latency was around 0.5ms and screen around 30ms. Network isn't a bottleneck (wired/802.11ac combination with plenty of bandwith and very low latency).

So if the network is capable I would like a client capable of handling this. Also looked into the J1900 and because I have some spare parts like ssd/wifi adapter (Asus PCE-AC68) it would be a huge investment. But basicly you're saying that the J1800 (combined with Win 8.1) would be capable of handling this? (Other problems put aside like steam in-home streaming handling it or not). I never got the chance to play around with this Bay Trail systems so no I idea what to expect.

Again thanks for the prompt reply, very much appreciated !