[mythtv-users] Dual Core or Dual CPU??

[Brian Wood]

On Saturday 04 August 2007 07:29, GyroTech wrote:
> Hello all - I'm looking for some hardware advice for a MythTV server I
> want to build.
>
> I'm looking to kit out a fairly beefy back-end, dealing with MythTV and
> a file server. It's going to have a PCI-E RAID5 card in it (RocketRAID
> seems to be a good choice there)and two, perhaps four, DVB-T tuner cards
> in it. All the front ends will be FE-only boxes, maybe even diskless.
>
> I was looking at forking out for a dual Opteron setup, but since these
> Core 2 Duos have come out they seem to be able to handle a fair grunt.
> So, has anyone worked with either\both setups care to give me an honest
> opinion on what they would do. Obviously the Intel chips and lower power
> and price on their side, but Opterons have the increased bus bandwidth
> (which helps greatly in the transcoding) and redundancy on their side.

I think just about any reasonably modern machine will do fine for you. A 
backend really doesn't have much of a CPU requirement in normal DVR 
operation, disk I/O being more important. CPU is required for commercial 
flagging, transcoding and DVD creation, but all those procesess can be niced 
as required, real time not being a factor.

Hardware RAID cards are expensive, and, IMHO, do not give any real advantage 
over Linux software RAID in a typical Myth system.

Your best solution will be a balance of power draw, physical form factor and, 
of course, cost. Finding a mobo that will accomodate 4 PCI cards and a PCI-E 
RAID card might be difficult.

-- 
BEWW