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

[Brian]

Bill Williamson wrote:
> On 8/4/07, GyroTech <gyrotech at freakinabox.com> wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> Why not the best of both worlds with an AMD64X2?  My backend runs a
> dual core 4000+ X2 and doesn't miss a beat with two HD streams doing
> realtime commercial transcoding.  This is on an nforce 430
> motherboard.
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>   

My MythTV system now is a dual core AMD Opteron 170, 1Gb RAM, a 3ware 
PCI controller (4x320Gb EIDE in RAID 5), Asus A8N32 motherboard (nForce 
4) and a nVidia 7300GT PCI-E video card running Fedora Core 6. I have 
two STBs and use the on-board firewire for capture. There is a PVR-350 
in there that I use for surveillance cameras. I have plenty of CPU to 
handle transcoding multiple shows, recording two shows and watching HDTV 
on my 720p LCD screen at the same time.

I also use this system as an Internet gateway (Firewall, DNS, NTP, DHCP 
e.t.c.), public web/mail server, MySQL, file server (NFS/SMB) and 
wireless access point for about 4-6 other computers in the house. The 
public facing services introduce low overhead as it's sitting on a cable 
modem connection. (not much upload bandwidth)

The Opteron 170 is a socket 939 CPU and I paid $110 for it with another 
$60 for the motherboard. $50 or so for memory. I also have a dual core 
185 but it gets very hot and doesn't *seem* much faster although it 
costs twice as much.

An E6600 would do it *very* easily. It seems the motherboard and memory 
prices for the Core Duo systems are far more expensive than the AMD 
systems. (the last time I checked) As it was mentioned before, an AMD 
3800 X2 can handle HDTV, why overspend?

HTH,
-Brian