XBMC and Windows 8 on older hardware

Just wanted to note that older hardware works well with the new Windows 8 consumer preview. Since I had to change the hdd in my xbmc mediacenter I decided to give Windows 8 a spin on real hardware (not just virtual).

Hardware:

• Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H motherboard (AMD 780G +SB700 chipset)
• AMD 4850e dual core energy efficient cpu
• 250Gb hdd (all media is stored on a NAS)
• 6Gb RAM

When I moved to a Full HD tv I found that I have to move away from XP to windows 7 in order to get decent hardware acceleration out of my integrated graphics. Because of power and heat issues I didn’t want to use a dedicated card. Windows 7 ran full hd decent but only using the latest drivers for my IGP from AMD-ATI.

In Windows 8 everything including hd videos worked out of the box, without installing any drivers. Still after installing the Windows 7 graphics driver found on AMD-ATI website performance got even better.

The system boots fast, xbmc works wonderful. Also the darn metro tiles look pretty good on a big screen - actually I hated metro on the desktop but on a big screen they look at home.