tell me making the Xbox an awesome media center!

[Hatta]

don't forget im talking about ATA 133 cables so that might be an additional 15% on top of the 30% since the jump from 33 to 100 then to 133 is about half.

The Xbox IDE controller is only capable of ATA100, so the ATA133 cable won't improve anything beyond that. Won't hurt anything either.

[vlame]

proof?

[Hatta]

I don't have the technical specs handy, but IIRC the MCP-X in the Xbox is essentially an nVidia MCP-D which only does ATA100. MCP-D boards that do ATA133 exist, but they use another ATA controller. Of course, we don't know exactly what's nVidia changed for Microsoft but I think it's pretty unlikely that they'd add ATA133 support when the Xbox ships with an ATA33 cable.

[vlame]

this is true but, wouldn't an ATA 133 wire be able to take full advantage of ATA 100 speeds without caps brought upon by the wire's speed? maybe not the 15% i spoke of but it would be at full potential of the ATA 100 controller.

I would be willing to try this out.

what would you say is the best xbox game and mame rom to test this out with? do FTP speeds show up on either side?

[Hatta]

The transfer speed is set by the capabilities of the controller. Better cable can't make the controller send data any faster. If you did want to collect benchmarks, what I would do is install Linux on it and do benchmarking with hdparm.

[vlame]

would i need to dedicate the xbox to linux?

[gtmtnbiker]

would i need to dedicate the xbox to linux?

Personally, I wouldn't go to the trouble of installing Linux. I would just run a few benchmark tests. For instance, put the new cable in. Time how long it takes to bring up XBMC. Time how long it starts a game, etc.

Power the xbox off and repeat the above a few more times to come up with a good average.

Then put the old cable and do the same exact tests.

[Hatta]

You ought to be able to install Xbox linux as an application inside XBMC or whatever you use for a dashboard. You could also do it the way gtmtnbiker suggested, with just a stopwatch and some easily repeatble loading activity. I like using hdparm because it gives you actual speeds in MB/s and generates its own data for sequential reads, so you know you're not measuring seek time instead of throughput.

[gtmtnbiker]

The theory I read in some other forums that the reason why you're getting better performance with a different cable is that the original xbox cable was poor quality so it did not allow the max possible speed.

[Curlypaul]

I bought my xBox a couple of years ago with the sole intention of using it as a media machine. I softmoded it and its been absolutely brilliant, its on the lan so I can watch all the avis that I download on the tv - I was glad to see the back of all that smeggin encoding and recoding that I previously had to do to to get the vobs to play on the dvd player.

I only have a handful of games for it as well, but there are plenty of decent games for it.

Mine still only has the original HDD in it, I need to find a bigger one seem before all of the IDE drives have dissappeared