[mythtv-users] Australian components

Craig Sanders cas at taz.net.au
Wed Jan 7 02:22:37 UTC 2009


On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 11:40:48PM +0900, Phil Wild wrote:
> I am thinking of going with s diskless frontend and boot over the
> network. 

network booting can be a pain to set up...it might be less hassle just
to buy a smallish SSD. they've come down a lot in price in recent
months. you can get a good 30GB SSD for <$200 now.  That's more than
enough for a boot disk for a myth frontend box. quiet, fast, low-power &
low-heat.

e.g. see the recent review of 4 SSDs on Dan's Data website.

http://www.dansdata.com/ssds.htm


i can't wait until you can get 500GB or 1TB SSDs for a comparable price
to today's HDDs.  AFAIAC, the sooner hard disks die and vanish like
1.44MB floppies, the better...over the years, hard disks have been the
component most likely to fail (i don't expect to get more than a year or
two out of them)

> The ASUS M3N78-HDMI will most likely be the motherboard I buy for the
> frontend and I am undecided on a case at the moment. Any suggestion on
> what AMD CPU I should buy?

it's hard to go past the AMD64 x2 5200 for about $80 AUD. only 65W (even
less with cpufreq throttling it down to 1Ghz when idle).

i've got a myth FE & BE box running with one of these CPUs on an ASUS
M3N78-EH motherboard w/ 2GB RAM, a 512MB nvidia 8400GS, and 3 DVB tuners
(old cards i picked up cheap on ebay).  Works nicely but i want to
replace the DVB tuners with a pair of either Nova-T 500 or Dvico Dual
4 cards. there seems to be some weird DMA problem with the old cards
if more than 3GB RAM is installed....and since RAM is cheap I bought
another 2x2GB sticks to install but can't until i replace the cards.

BTW, the system is running debian sid. mythtv recently updated to
0.21.svn20090101-0.0


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>


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