[mythtv-users] Help please! Confusion - which of Atom+Ion | S775 | AM2+ | i3 | Zacate to go for?! :/

[David Cushing]

Firstly, greetings to all.
I'm on a quest to get rid of Sky and replace my Apple TV with something more
capable, and am in the process of building an HTPC.
I seem to be throwing myself into a tailspin over which platform to go for
though, and was hoping some of you could help me decide.
My requirements are thus:

   - Quiet running, as near to silent as possible.
   - Low power consumption, and/or can be woken from sleep with ACPI for
   scheduled recordings
   - Linux compatible (although I'm probably going to dual-boot it with Win7
   for proper Blu-ray support when I add that)
   - Runs MythTV front and back ends, also runs Boxee and XBMC.
   - 720 capable graphics. (No 1080 TV yet!)
   - VGA output for the projector, on the odd occasion.
   - S/P-DIF audio output
   - Also capable of running a few background server daemons such as
   SABNZBD, Apache, Sick Beard, Couch Potato
   - Operating as a NAS
   - Adding a Blu-ray drive (with full HDCP playback support) at some point,
   although not necessary in the near future.
   - Preferably mATX rather than mITX, so I can add in a couple of expansion
   cards, including a DVB-S2 PCIe card I have no, adding a DVB-T card, and
   maybe even upgrading graphics in the future to support full 1080 (assuming I
   go for something like an i3 now which I believe would be pushing its
   capabilities a little...)
   - I don't see a need for wifi, as the airwaves are far too congested
   around here so I'm going to hard-wire it.


My first choice was an Atom/Ion combination.
I'm struggling to find the best board here though... The Zotac G-E board
seems to be a good buy but doesn't have S/P-DIF output. I do have an
external USB audio S/P-DIF interface that would suffice there. I spotted the
ASUS 510 board which has the upgraded D525 Atom and ION2 graphics, but it
has no VGA output so that wouldn't support the projector.
With these options, I'd have to mess around with getting a USB DVB-T stick
to work with Linux, although the Zotac board has a mini-PCIe slot that I
could use for that. Obviously I'd be stuck with the on board graphics with
these, but the ION and ION2 support 1080, so that could work. Is there a
huge benefit for going for a SU2300 over the Atom? The price difference
seems to be about £50 over the Atom variant... which is quite a bit if the
performance increment is minimal.

Then I saw the Zacate boards coming out, and they sound better - except for
(lack of) Linux support. Anecdotally, it would seem AMD are way behind the
curve in releasing drivers, and you can't offload video processing to the
GPU. Is that correct?

Then I wondered about a low power socket 775 chip, such as an E5400, which
would outperform the Atom, and couple it with a passively cooled NVidia
graphics card on a mATX board. Obviously the power consumption here is going
to shoot up from the Atom/ION boards, but by how much? Is it possible to
underclock these so as to bring the power down?

The next option - although going up a bit in price, is the i3 option. On
board graphics are not meant to be as good as the ION option, but I could
again, in future (when I need 1080) then add an external card to provide
better support for that.

Then I ALSO spotted the fact that Sempron chips are lower in power
consumption than their Intel equivalents, and you can get motherboards with
on-board Nvidia graphics, such as the GeForce 7025 chipsets, which again,
might suffice at the moment. There are some really good prices available on
combinations here, bringing in a mobo+cpu+ext graphics+memory in for the
same price as an atom/ion mobo.

I also quite like the ASUS barebones systems - I built a pundit years ago,
and was really impressed with the build quality of their kit, as well as the
aesthetic look of their case. Something like the Asus V6-P7H55E would take
an i3, and has the expansion capabilities I need.

But all of these options are throwing me into complete confusion over which
option to go with.
I spontaneously (drunkenly ahem ) bought a DVB-S2 pci-e card, so I know that
I have a hard requirement for a slot to support that.
After that, I'm flexible in my choices.

Any help would be most gratefully received. This decision process is driving
me mad. (My adhd seems to be rising to the challenge of befuddling any
choice I get close to making here!)

Many thanks

David
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