[mythtv-users] Hardware recommended?

[Robert Denier]

I'd go with an nforce chipset probably.  I bought an nforce 2 board for this 
purpose and it seems fine, and it is fairly low cost.  Fancier and newer ones 
are probably fine, but I'd avoid anything that was released in the past ~3 
months if possible, unless you have solid information on its reliability in 
similar situations.  [Things a few months old tend to have more bugs worked 
out, and may even have bios updates available.]

For capture, unless your dealing with firewire or HDTV over the air signals, 
you almost certainly want to go with a hauppage card.  I'd just get a PVR 150 
and if you need another later you can add one then.  Of course if your sure 
you want two then the 500's work well apparently.  (A 500 is basically two 
150's on a single pci card.)

For memory 512MB is probably the best choice.  More probably won't help, 
although HDTV might be an exception.

I only used KnoppMyth for a day to try to figure out why my Gentoo 
installation didn't work.  Still, it is a good starting point.

I'm not familiar with that particular motherboard.

As regards to noise, well you need to decide if you want your backend to be 
separate from your frontend(s).  If so, then maybe your backend can make lots 
of noise, but be put somewhere so it doesn't matter.

Your front end can be diskless and fanless if you go with something like VIA 
EPIA, or probably some normal processors, with the right heat sinks.  One 
irritation about diskless systems is they seem to lag a bit more and are of 
course more trouble to initially setup.  Gigabit network based diskless 
systems might be interesting.  Some of the cases on logicsupply.com use power 
supplies without fans, although what all those can be used with would require 
some research...

Good luck.  Btw I'm sure I've seen this topic several times before.  If you 
look around the mythtv web page there should be a link to search old messages 
of this list somewhere.

-Robert

On Wednesday 16 November 2005 07:36 pm, Bertrand M wrote:
> Hello,
>
>   I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction in regards  to
> hardware, as I am getting a little overwhelmed with all the choices.  I run
> FreeBSD and XP at home, but haven't used Linux in a long time.
>
>   Here are my needs:
>
>       - I want to use the Silverstone LC11M case,
>       - I will probably use KnoppMyth as it seems the easiest
>       - am worried about fan noise,
>       - will be using MAME and bittorrent more than actual encoding
>       - but want one capture card with the option of having two at some
> point, - am not worried about money necessarily (if something costs 100$
> more and is THAT much better, fine)
>
>   For a mobo, I was looking at
>       BIOSTAR TForce6100-939
>   but it seems that is very problematic with Linux drivers?
>
>   Another direction I was considering would be to use a mobile Pentium or
> Celeron. Is this common?
>
>   I assumed my first capture card would be a Hauppauge PVR-x50.
>
>   What mobo+cpu combos run the coolest and are least problematic driver
> wise? GPU wise, sounds like nVIDIA is the only way to go, correct?
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
>  Yahoo! FareChase - Search multiple travel sites in one click.