[mythtv-users] New system hardware suggestions

[Brad Templeton]

On Sun, Jul 16, 2006 at 01:07:15PM +0300, Kari Salmela wrote:
> I am thinking of putting in either Intel Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 x2. 
> System should be silent, powerful when needed and rock-solid in 
> stability. It seems that there are not yet many motherboard choices for 
> Core 2 Duo but I guess that will change once CPU's are out to public. 
> AMD will need to lower prices in order to compete, so it may well be a 
> good choice, too. Are there any technical points to choose a Intel or 
> AMD wrt. to mythtv?

What makes the Core 2 Duo a good choice (the cheapest one at least) is
that it's part of the modern focus on lower wattage and heat.   That means
cheaper to run, and less fan needed too.

> There are new SATA II disks in market from WD, Seagate etc. Anything 
> special there to consider? WD Caviar RE2
> (WD3200YS) seems a good choice in theory?

You actually don't want high powered disk drives.  If you could still
get them readily, MythTV would be better with 4500rpm drives, and the
type of interface doesn't matter -- PATA is more than enough, though
there is nothing wrong with SATA or SATA-II other than the issue of whether
you have drivers for the controller.

4500 rpm drives take less power, run quieter and will have longer lives
due to the lower heat and speed.   Video, even HDTV, requires only about
2 mb/second of disk bandwidth.   You have enough margin to be reading and
writing several streams with just about any drie.

> 
> What about display adapter: I guess current Nvidia card would be ok for 
> new system, but it is AGP and new systems are mostly PCI-E only. I do 
> not need any 3D gaming or anything like that, just mythtv performance 
> counts. Just some cheapo Geforce 6200TC card or should I invest more? 
> ATI has some MPEG-4 / h.264 acceleration in Avivo technology, but will 
> it work with their linux drivers and/or mythtv at all? Card should have 
> a passive cooling or need to have support for heat pipe type cooling for 
> minimum noise.
> 

Unless you plan to use xvmc -- in which case you can do HDTV fine on
your old AMD 2400 system -- there is very little "performance" to be had
from your video card.   Higher bandwidth to the card (ie PCI-e) always
helps, but other than that you won't be use any of the graphics chip's
fancy features, just xvideo.    So get the cheapest, slowest, lowest
heat card you can get.    Since the AGP memory bandwidth is readily
sufficient for HDTV, you may consider going to older gen cards and
motherboards (except your core duo probably will only come with pci-e)

The most common card people used for HDTV in the dawn was the Geforce 5200,
a very cheap card.  It does HD just fine.  Getting more may just be wasting
money, and generating heat.  (The slower cards can often run with just a
heatsink, not a fan, which is also nice.)

In some ways I wonder if the ideal system isn't something like a super low
power Geode and xvmc, at least in terms of power consumption (which maps to
both cost and noise.  Remember, the electricity is the most expensive part
of any high-end system.)