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

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sun Sep 27 01:39:08 UTC 2009


On Saturday 26 September 2009 15:15:00 Mary Strimel wrote:
> Wow, thanks everyone for your insightful comments.  I should have
> mentioned, this will be a FE/BE machine.
>
> As I continued researching, I did find a Gigabyte board that promise
> extra durability and cooling properties:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128387
>
> Reviews indicate the copper layer really does help with cooling and
> it's not very much more expensive at all.
>
> On the CPU, I hear y'all saying that the Athlon X2 should be enough
> power for my box.  The mobo above promises "extra" energy saving
> abilities if paired with a Phenom chip.  Would it be crazy to get the
> Phenom to take advantage of this, ie. would I just "save" more power
> by getting the Athlon X2?  This PC will be powered up 24x7.
>
> p.s. to Brian, great suggestion and analogy of getting server-class
> stuff ("used mercedes") - that is the type of person I am - drove an
> '86 Saab until last year - but unf. I need something tame enough for
> the living room, at least for now!

You need your car in your living room? :-)

What I do is keep the noisy server hardware in the garage, all rack mounted. I 
use silent thin client type hardware to display a desktop using RDP (VNC 
would work as well), so I get the power of the server hardware from a quiet, 
low-power all solid-state device.

Of course the problem is you can't get accelerated video over a network RDP or 
VNC link, you're pretty well restricted to frame buffer like performance, but 
for most of what I do that's fine.

In addition to more computing power, the main advantage of server-class 
hardware to me is that it is more reliable, and things like PCI 
implementation squirrels just don't happen with good quality server 
motherboards, they are just all around better designed and better built 
beasts than a lot of consumer-type stuff.

My plan is to put a backend in the garage, running on older server hardware. 
I'm trying to decide whether to use a standard frontend in the LR, or perhaps 
put the F/E in the garage and use one of many possible solutions to get the 
video and audio to the TV set in the LR, whether by cable or some sort of 
wireless connection (perhaps one of the KVM over Cat-5 solutions would work 
for this?).

Fortunately it's only a 12 foot cable run from the LR to the garage, with only 
one wall to go through. I'm already feeding audio, network and USB this way, 
I guess a DVI/VGA or even HDMI cable could be routed the same way, or even 
component video.

I'm using a combo F/E-B/E in the LR now, and the noise doesn't bother me much. 
It's an old Athlon-64 3700 (socket 754) w/1GB RAM and it works quite well, 
but I plan to upgrade to something a little beefier that can handle HD 
better. The present machine can display HD well (nvidia 5700 card), but 
transcoding and commflagging HD a lot may tax it a bit. I also have a spare 
quad Opteron server with 16GB of RAM, and I'd like to put that to use.

I have an HDHR, which gives me a lot of flexibility in location, but I'm 
looking forward to being able to use my HD-PVR when 0.22 is released. I can 
either use my existing USB link from the LR to the garage, or even run the 
component video from the DISH receiver to the HD-PVR, and locate that in the 
garage.

Basically I want to be able to have as much as possible in the garage, out of 
site, out of hearing and out of the way in general. I'm re-thinking my entire 
setup, I have a lot of hardware hanging around, and there are so many ways to 
configure it...

Of course a big problem with server type machines is power consumption. This 
can be managed, to an extent, but is still a problem.

I also have a 2KW UPS system in the garage, something else generally not 
wanted in a LR, but I'm a firm believer in starting at the beginning: the AC 
power system.


-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list