[mythtv-users] Re: Shuttle MN31L/N
Vinton Coffman
vintonc at redzone.com
Wed May 19 16:16:00 EDT 2004
> Hi, I am currently using the Chaintech 7nif2 board for my MythTV box
> but
> I am thinking of going to the Shuttle MN31L (or the MN31N) board as
> they
> support S/PDIF.
>
> The Chaintech and the Shuttle boards seems pretty much identical (as
> far
> as features) apart from the audio system difference (Chaintech uses
> nVidia MCP and Shuttle uses nVidia MCP-T).
>
> My question is: is/has any one used the Shuttle MN31L/N boards and what
> is their experience with them. Any problems that I might have?
I've used a Shuttle MN31N for the last year without any problems after
the inital setup. The initial setup did have some hiccups. I bought
the board shortly after it was released and the BIOS had some issues
that were solved after a month of banging my head on the wall. The
main problem had to do with memory precharge. There is now a option to
disable it and that is the way I run my system. There were some issues
with either ACPI or APIC, I can't remember which. I'm running kernel
2.4.23 with the problem module disabled. When I upgrade to Fedora Core
2 I'll try a standard RedHat kernel but why rock the boat if its
running fine now.
I don't remember the specs for the Chaintech but the Shuttle doesn't
have video out capability. There's no output pins on the board either.
That didn't bother me though. I wanted the other features like
Firewire, USB2, ATA100 or better and SPDIF audio that this boad
offered. I use a GeForce 4 440MX. Its an Asus Magic card. I just
looked and I don't see the GF4 series card just the 5600. The Magic
series has s-video out and a passive heatsink so its quiet.
I haven't hooked up the SPDIF audio yet. Still haven't taken the time
to get alsa to do this and I just got an amp that can handle the input.
Its still using the OSS compatible stuff from ALSA /dev/dsp so I can't
comment on that aspect of the board.
My issues stemmed from being an early adopter of this board. You
should have a much smoother time.
My current config consists of 2 pvr-250 card (one rev1 and one rev2), a
modem card for caller id, 2 120 GB Seagate hard drives using LVM, 8X
AGP GeForce 4 440MX, DVD-ROM drive, Athlon XP 2500 Barton, 512 MB RAM,
Enermax 365 W PS, and a CoolerMaster ATC-610 case. The system is a
little too noisy, I'm going to get a DigitalDoc5+ to monitor temps.
Then maybe look into water cooling or a fanless power supply or both.
Good luck,
Vinton
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