[mythtv-users] Yet another noobie sanity check ;-)

[Stephen Tait]

>
>Case            Asus Aria

Personally, I'd go for a different case. I expect there's a lot of people 
here who have and like this case, but the reviews I have read say the case 
gets uncomfortably hot. Plus it has one of the dreaded proprietary PSU's 
which cost an utter fortune to replace. You can get much roomier (although 
unfortunately bigger) mATX cases that accept normal ATX PSU's. If size 
isn't an issue, you're OK. Be warned that the PVR cards kick out *alot* of 
heat.

>CPU             AMD Athlon XP2000+ (1.67GHz) Thoroughbred Retail

If you're not going to do anything really intensive, you can easily get 
away with a Duron. I'm assuming you can't get any lower-powered Athlons.

>256 Mb          Samsung 256Mb DDR333 PC2700

I *really* would go for 512MB. In the UK at least, it's not an awful lot 
more than 256MB, and gives a colossal speed increase on modern (i.e. bloaty 
;^) OS's.

>CPU Cooler      ?? Something quiet

The stock AMD coolers can be made very quiet if you take off the 60mm fan, 
throw on a £3 adapter, mount an 80mm on it and run that at 7V.


>Sound card (5.1 min)    inc (motherboard)

Argh! It'd be nice if you could get yourself a Soundblaster Live or Audigy, 
but then I'm biased - had bad experiences with onboard sound before.

>DVD super drive (DVD +-RW,CDRW) LG 4082B OEM WHT

Do you really need a CD writer if you're trying to save cashish? Combo 
drives are pretty expensive here, whereas you can get an easily 
region-unlockable quiet DVD-ROM for about £22. I like the MSI ones, cos 
they're cheap as chips and are simply rebranded Pioneer drives, and I've 
never had a problem with Pioneer DVD drives yet, touch wood! (Plays sad 
lament for his first CD writer, an 8x TEAC, which died horrifically this 
weekend)


>5) how much space is needed for the system? I'm hoping to install a small 
>HD with just the system on it. I have a few *old* drives, maybe 1.6G - 3G 
>lying around... is that enough? I'm probably dreaming, but I'd like not to 
>have to buy a 40G just for the system.

You should be OK with your 3G as long as you don't use a big desktop 
environment (KDE and GNOME are prolly right out) and install a minimal 
window manager like xfce or one of the *boxes. I use fluxbox, / is about 
47MB, /usr is 2.53GB (this is a gentoo install, so lots of source code in 
here) and /var is 220MB.