[mythtv-users] Hardware question

Sat Aug 31 01:29:00 UTC 2013

On 8/30/13 9:13 PM, Captain Hook wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Stephen P. Villano
> <stephen.p.villano at gmail.com <mailto:stephen.p.villano at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     On 8/30/13 8:24 PM, HP-mini wrote:
>     > On Sat, 2013-08-31 at 12:04 +1200, HP-mini wrote:
>     >> On Fri, 2013-08-30 at 17:46 -0400, Stephen P. Villano wrote:
>     >>> On 8/30/13 4:10 PM, HP-mini wrote:
>     >>>> On Thu, 2013-08-29 at 22:59 -0400, Captain Hook wrote:
>     >>
>     >>> Well, I have a list of specs now for any future PC builds
>     here.  ;)
>     >>> But, I'm limited on the hardware of this machine to either AGP
>     or PCI,
>     >>> looks like PCI is going to win this race with the 210 card I'm
>     looking at.
>     >>>
>     >>> Rather ironic how I relied on this same model dual xeon system
>     at work a
>     >>> handful of years ago, now it's simply serving up media for the
>     house.
>     >>> Oh well, it was either this system or the spare Dell 2850 in the
>     >>> basement.  ;)
>     >>> _______________________________________________
>     >> There are no PCI nVidia 200 series video cards..
>     >> PCI was obsoleted by AGP & that was a long long time ago..
>     >> The last PCI video card were oddball versions of 8400GS.
>     >>
>     >> There are no AGP cards that support VDPAU but with a fast CPU
>     that does
>     >> not matter (except for power consumption).
>     >>
>     >>
>     > Wikipedia suggests that there is a PCI version of GT210.
>     > That could have been made to support some OEM requirement & would be
>     > more expensive.
>     > I think the wikipedia info is wrong..
>     > But good luck trying to find one.
>     >
>
>     http://www.amazon.com/Sparkle-PC-GeForce-Graphics-SP210L512JCPI/dp/B00ABG6Y5S/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1377812745&sr=8-15&keywords=GeForce+210
>     Says it's PCI and a GeForce 210 clone.
>
>     Regardless, it's *got* to be better than the Quadro4 with bad memory
>     that was in the  machine (had to steal a card from my spare, spare
>     antique to get the thing lit up.
>     But, I think dual 1.8GHZ Xeon processors have a fair amount of
>     horsepower. In spite of my running four cams, two IP cams, two V4L
>     cams
>     for ZoneMinder on it as well (those keep an eye on my 83 year old
>     father, who is suffering from dementia).
>
>     For fun, I use a Cubox to monitor those cameras when upstairs and when
>     dad's in bed, watch videos off of my Myth backend.
>     Mixed results for the entertainment, acceptable performance with the
>     monitoring the surveillance cameras. It falters when handling swift
>     action movie scene changes and heavy compression.
>     I'm going to play a bit with that unit as well, as I'm certain
>     that some
>     of the video processing isn't quite being exploited as well as it
>     can be.
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>
>
> I had a PowerEdge 2950 at the office that was previously running
> Exchange 2007 for my entire office of 110+ users.  After virtualizing
> it was sitting around doing nothing so I decided to bring it home and
> use it in place of the server I built in January.  I turned it on and
> it sounded like a jet airplane.  I guess the datacenter in my office
> is loud because it seemed quiet in there.  In any case, it was a dual
> Xeon server with 16GB of RAM and multiple 146GB 15K SAS drives with
> hardware raid (Perc 6) so I thought it would at least be comparable to
> my existing i5 3570k-based "server" I already had, right?  Wrong.  A
> few benchmarks proved that the i5 system could run absolute circles
> around the PowerEdge so I promptly took it back to the office where it
> is now a FreeNAS system to play around with.
>
Yeah, they're good for their purpose. Raw storage, general purpose
medium level DB and tossing data. Processing? Workstations do better, as
they're designed to do so. Think your 2950 is loud, try my SCSI 2850's.
I swear that the 1960's batmobile is getting ready to blaze out of my
basement.
But, seemed quiet in the datacenter at the time.
Of course, I never heard the fire alarm go off in the hallway while I
was in the datacenter. The hint I had was the cloud puffing out of the
air ducts.
And the mass confusion and noise in the hallway when I opened the door
to see if anyone knew where that puff of nasty came from (turned out
they were cleaning the ducts and someone banged a duct, pushing desert
dust throughout the end of the system and setting off the fire alarm
sensors).
We got an annunciator for the datacenter after that.
But, when I first fired up those two 2850's, it blew my wife's mind
thinking I was in a center with hundreds of the things running.
Of course, her mind was already pre-blown from my military career. 
Or was that raising the kids...?   ;)

No, it was the latter. Blew my mind too.
But, grandbabies are fine. Fun too. We can tell to go home, we're tired
and take mom and dad with them.  ;)
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