[mythtv-users] new rig ... help with specs

[Travis Tabbal]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:

> On Saturday 19 September 2009 12:09:32 Mary Strimel wrote:
> > hi,
> > after 5 years I am replacing my mythtv box ... yay!  I'm pretty sure I
> > want another AMD 64.  However, I have had problems with my hard disks
> > being unreliable ... every couple years one will go bad, it seems. I
> > have few general questions about how to proceed:
>
>
Frontend, backend, or both?

>
> > 1. Among the major / widely supported brands of motherboards, which
> > are considered well-built, highest quality, long lasting, etc?
> > Gigabyte seems to have several models available for AMD; I am
> > interested in something really solid... comments?
>
> I've always had good luck with Asus, though recently I have had two of them
> fail. One I was able to resurrect by replacing the caps, the other is now
> shot. I still think Asus makes good boards.
>
>
I would second that. Asus boards have been working very well for me for the
last few years. I've also had good luck with Gigabyte. There are Asus boards
with all solid capacitors if you like that feature. My new server is running
an M4N82 Deluxe with solid caps and other nice features. It's on the higher
end price-wise, but for a server I'd rather get high-end consumer gear or
mid-range server gear. In this case, I needed more PCIe slots.  For a
frontend machine, or perhaps a combined box, the M3N78-VM has been working
great.

> 2. should I care about AMD X2 versus higher priced Phenom X3 or X4
> > CPU?  I want plenty of extra power (just for HTPC, not gaming) but not
> > plenty of extra heat The max stress on this system I can imagine would
> > be taping 1 show in HD, watching another at the same time, while
> > something is transcoding and let's say mythfilldatbase decides to run
> > too.  Want a CPU that will be a great HTPC for at least 5 years.  But
> > I assume the more CPU cycles, the more heat in the case (see below)?
> > What AMD CPU will strike a good balance here?
>
>
I'd get one of the lower wattage X2s if you don't need the extra CPU power.
For a backend only machine, the extra CPU (and heat) might be acceptable if
you are going to do a lot of transcoding and comflagging. For a frontend
machine, I would go with an NVidia 8xxx or 9xxx based card or motherboard
for VDPAU so you can offload video playback to the GPU so you can get a
smaller CPU and save heat, power, and costs. One of my frontend only
machines is running an X2 3800+ and it's significantly overpowered with
VDPAU using the onboard 8300 graphics to decode the video. I see use of
about 5% when playing HD streams. If you have a decent box, Myth tends to be
more I/O bound than CPU bound. Put the OS and database on a separate, small
drive and use 2 or more drives for the storage group or RAID them. That
should help a lot with the biggest bottleneck my Myth machines have seen.



> > 3.  Would it help my hard drives live longr if i move up to a full ATX
> > motherboard and give them room to "breathe"?  This probably seems like
> > a stupid question but I am really at a loss for why my drives have
> > been fritzy.  I had one get a bad circuit board, another is throwing
> > I/O errors and I've been unable to determine the cause (ran memtests,
> > fsck, etc. to no avail).  My case has 2 exhaust fans and seems to
> > ventilate OK but the drives seem to run hot.  I'll be getting 2 new
> > SATA drives for this box ... comments on reliability, brands, or ways
> > to keep them healthy?  Does eSATA support matter for anything?
>
>
It doesn't seem to matter according to the data Google published a while
back. Some drives just run hot. If you can tolerate the slower access times,
the new low-power 5400/5900 RPM drives are an option to keep heat down. I
think, in general, Myth would work fine with them. Put 2 in a storage group
and Myth will balance the loads for you. eSATA is nice for backups, IMO. I
have a SATA dock that connects with eSATA and USB and the eSATA port is
significantly faster for backups. You could also move the HDDs to external
enclosures so you don't have them, and their heat, in the main case.

Drives are a PITA. It's nearly impossible to predict if the drive you have
will work well and for how long. I just treat them all as if they might die
without notice tomorrow and keep backups of the important data. It sucks,
but that's life with cheap HDDs. If you want to, you can try to buy
reliability with enterprise/RAID rated drives. Samsung has some with 7 year
warranties, I'm sure Seagate and WD have similar offerings. I find that with
comsumer drives, if I can get them to run under load for a few weeks without
data loss, I'm in pretty good shape for the long run. I also generally run
RAID5 or better so that I can tolerate a drive loss.



> > 4. One of the boards I am considering has onboard NVIDIA 8300 graphics
> > (see asus below), another has ATI radeon 3000 onboard graphics.  Are
> > onboard graphics a Bad Idea?  I see threads like this one
> > (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=125246) and get a
> > little scared.
>


Nothing wrong with onboard graphics if they will work for you. An 8300 based
board will do VDPAU so you can get a slower CPU or use the CPU for other
things. Personally, for Myth, I avoid ATI as driver support is lacking in
the areas a Myth box will care about. For Myth, VDPAU is a "killer app" in
my mind, if ATI can't/won't answer with a proper driver that can do the same
things, they aren't worth my money. Right now, NVidia is selling what I want
when it comes to Myth and even Linux in general. It sucks that I have to use
a closed-source binary driver, but I can live with that if it's decent
quality and gets updated frequently.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20090921/dc4099af/attachment-0001.htm>