[mythtv-users] New Front End / Back End system build report

Ray maillists at sonictech.net
Thu Oct 14 01:23:33 UTC 2010


I just finished building a new combination FE/BE system to replace the 
box in my living room.  The build came out pretty well so I thought I'd 
share the list of components that I used.

Case: Lian Li PC-K7B .   It's probably bigger than what some would want 
in their living room but it's nice looking and blends in well once you 
disable the blinding blue power LED.   More importantly it has excellent 
ventilation and plenty of room for extra drives etc.  I'm not crazy 
about the hard drive mounting method but I won't be swapping drives in 
this thing regularly anyway.  One other minor issue,  the bracket that 
holds the PSU partially covers the bottom of the PSU and could restrict 
air flow.  It doesn't seem to be a problem with my particular PSU but it 
could be with some others.

Motherboard:  Gigabyte GA-H55-USB3 .  It supports the whole alphabet 
soup of external connectors including esata, firewire, usb3, hdmi, dvi, 
vga, s/pdif ......   It has Plenty of PCI and PCIe slots for whatever 
capture cards I might add later.  Also the H55 chipset supports Intel's 
Core I chips with integrated video (more later).  It even had a serial 
header and I was able to dig the appropriate cable/connctor/bracket out 
of my "box of stuff".  My only complaint is that only 2 of the 4 fan 
headers (cpu and Sys Fan 2) appear to have pwm speed controllers attached. 

CPU:  Intel Core I3-540 (3GHz) with integrated video.

Power Supply: Seasonic S12II Bronze 520W .  I already had this on the 
shelf as a backup for my server so it was an easy choice.  Seems dead 
silent to me but doesn't push a lot of air so I probably wouldn't use it 
in a case that didn't have a separate exhaust fan.

Memory: 4GB ( 2 sticks ) Gskill DDR3 ram.

Hard Drives:  2TB WD Green Drive for storage and the 60GB laptop drive 
out of my Thinkpad T60 (upgraded that one to an SSD).   I learned  last 
time that having the DB and storage on the same drive could be 
troublesome.  I planned to swap the laptop drive for an SSD later but 
it's working well enough that I'll probably just leave it as is.

Capture Card:  PVR-500 out of my previous Myth Box.

Video Card:  Using the integrated (in the CPU) Intel video.  I only gave 
myself about a 50/50 chance of being able to use this with Myth but 
between the power savings and the OSS drivers I thought it was worth a 
shot.  It turns out that with the very latest Mythbuntu it works just 
fine.  I've heard of some people having trouble getting audio over the 
hdmi port but I'm not using that feature. 

OS:  Mythbuntu 10.10 .   I had planned on using Debian but I discovered 
that I really wanted a more recent kernel and X servers than I could 
easily get on Debian Lenny and I'm already familiar with Ubuntu so 
Mythbuntu seemed worth a shot.  Somewhat surprisingly nearly all the 
hardware just worked out of the box.  The video/audio/network 
connections were all automagically configured.  It took all of about 3 
clicks to get the audio going out the S/PDIF port to my home theater 
system and it seems to just work for everything I play.  This was a 
major project on my last Myth setup several years ago.  Mythbuntu had a 
lirc profile for my old Packard Bell remote receiver that mostly worked 
but was missing some important buttons such as Esc and Pause.  I ended 
up using irxevent for the missing buttons rather than modifying the 
profile for each media player app separately. Transfering my old 
database over was scary but worked out just fine using the 
mythconverg_backup.pl and mythconverg_restore.pl scripts.  When I fired 
up mythtv-setup it took care of upgrading the DB from 0.21 to 0.23 
automatically.  I do have one remaining quirk.  My USB-Serial adapters 
(pl2303) don't work at boot up.  I have to unplug them, remove the 
driver (modprobe -r pl2303) and then re-add the driver.  I almost never 
re-boot this box anyway but it's still annoying.  Hopefully either the 
Ubuntu folks or the kernel folks will sort that out soon.

Misc:  Although the fans that came with this case were already pretty 
quiet I still ended up using a pair of older Thermaltake fan controllers 
mounted in the pci cutouts to slow the two front fans down a bit.  I 
left the cpu fan and rear exhaust controlled by bios for now but I'll 
probably have Linux take control of the exhaust fan later.  I may add 
bay mounted multi-fan controller later. 

Overall Impression:  This setup really works well.  It's plenty fast, 
stable (so far) and nearly silent.    Although the Intel video doesn't 
yet support much in the way of acceleration (I think xvmc is supported 
but I'm not using it) this cpu seems to have plenty speed to decode just 
about anything.  From what I've read vaapi support is in the works as 
well.  Typical power consumption is about 60-70w according to my 
Kil-O-Watt meter which is just a little less than my previous AMD Athlon 
2800+ . 

-- 
Ray



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