[mythtv-users] MytthTV system: ATX vs mATX motherboard?

Ben Dash ben_dash at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 31 21:05:02 UTC 2006


--- Jake Palmer <jakep_82 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: Matthias Thyroff <lists at thyroff.net>
> >Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:53:57 +0100
> > > In short: get an ATX board with 5 PCI slots, and
> put it in a case
> > > where you can fit three or four drives (or more)

It all depends on what your needs are.  I got fed up
with having half a dozen PCI cards to obscure the
airflow in my PCs so I've decided to go with onboard
everything, wherever I can.  If you want to do gaming
I'd suggest that you wait a couple of months for a $99
PS2.

I have just bought the parts for my new Myth Backend,
and since I don't plan on doing any gaming I went for
a fully integrated mATX Biostar M7VIG with onboard
Lan, Video, and Audio with 2GB RAM, a Sempron 2800+
and a 750GB Seagate.

I'm planning on consolidating 3 PCs into 1:

1 - MythBackend
2 - Lan Gateway/Firewall/Fileserver/Printserver
3 - My Desktop PC - web browsing, light development,
word processing

If it wasn't for PC #3 (My Desktop PC) I would have
just used my existing PIII 933 (passively cooled)
server to consolidate PC #1 and #2.

My only worry is that I'll have to buy an IDE
controller card for the 750GB HDD.  Also, I would have
preferred to have used a Socket A dual onboard LAN
Motherboard but I couldn't find one that wasn't
discontinued/out-of-stock, so I'm just going to plug
in an old PCI NIC card alongside the PVR250.

I'm going to get a second 750GB hard drive in a few
months, when the prices come down, and set the 2
drives up as a RAID 1 (mirror) with an ezRAID
controller.  Then make periodic archives on DVD to
store remotely, just in case something happened to the
fileserver.

The eventual goal is to reduce the whole house down to
just one central fileserver where all the other PCs
boot from the Lan, using solid state eBox 3800
diskless workstations and an old ME6000.

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