[mythtv-users] How to make use of old hardware

Eric Smith erictsmith at gmail.com
Tue Apr 24 00:56:48 UTC 2007


This question is probably a matter of preference more so than anything
else, but I'm just curious about peoples opinions/best practices as
far as making the best use of your hardware in a myth network.  For
background, I've been using myth for about 3 years now.  I started
with a combined FE/BE on an 800mhz athlon i had lying around and
eventually upgraded to a HD FE/BE on a 2500+ athlon XP and moved to
old box to a dedicated SD FE.  I have a pvr-500 and grab HD through
firewire.  I will shortly be buying my second HD tv so i will need
another HD frontend.  So, the question is, what's the best way to
distribute my existing hardware to limit what new hardware i'll be
buying, leave as little of my existing hardware sitting around
collecting dust as possible, and make the best performing system as a
whole.

Ideally when this is all done i'd like to have:
1. A standalone backend in a seperate room which will also serve as a
basic web browser and if the time allows to hopefully start doing some
development and contribute to the project
2. 2 HD frontends (given what hardware i have, i might want 1 or both
of these to also be slave backends to help with commflagging)
3. 1 SD frontend

I currently have basically 3 systems lying around or in use that can
by thrown into the mix.
Athlon XP 2500+, Geforce 6200, pvr-500, 2x512 ram, 400gig+250gig (my
current be/fe)
Athlon 1200Mhz, Geforce 5200, 2x256 ram 120gig (my current fe)
Athlon 800Mhz, Geforce 4400, 256 ram, 120gig (collecting dust)

Doing some quick searching i was thinking about grabbing:
Athlon X2 4400+, Geforce 7300GS, a gig of ddr2, a relatively small hdd
(for a 2nd frontend)

Sorry for the long post, thoughts are welcome.


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