[mythtv-users] New Computer Advice

David Wood obsidian at panix.com
Fri Jul 16 15:19:27 EDT 2004


To the original poster: you may find these helpful

http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1930
http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-pvrhwdb.php

Just to add to the confusion, in general, you want to make your system as 
powerful as it needs to be and no more powerful than that. Even if you 
don't care about your electric bill, you will care about the noise 
associated with running a beefy PC near where you watch TV. This is why 
some people split front/back ends (so they can use a very light 
front-end), using EPIA's and xboxes, or underclocking their CPU. You'll 
see a lot of overlap between this community and the general "stealth" or 
"quiet PC" community.

If you are building yourself, pay close attention to your CPU heatsink, 
case fans (if any) and power supply - you can get "quiet" versions of all 
and the difference is really significant if you do. Also pay attention to 
the motherboard (avoid those with fans - some do have them now) and 
graphics card (i.e. small fanless nvidia fx5200's are popular, for 
instance). And of course, the quality of your case can make or break your 
noise/heat situation...

A totally fanless system is the ideal, and that means sacrifices in 
speed/power. That plus having a diskless front-end can get you total 
silence. But even without going to that extreme, it helps to be mindful of 
the issue.

>
> Speaking of the pcHDTV card.  If you are thinking of using this card someday and watch OTA high-def - make sure you get something faster then a P4 3.0GHz processor.  My 2.6GHz is just enough (and that's only if I run with XvMC enabled).
>
> I'm in the market for a 3.2G processor so I can help smooth out some of the jitter with my 2.6G processor.  I wish I had known this when I bought my parts for mythtv. :)
>
> -John
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Boleslaw Ciesielski <bolek-mythtv at curl.com>
> Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 10:29:19 -0400
> To: Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] New Computer Advice
>
>> Anthony Spinoza wrote:
>>> hours of configuration is the mainboard. This is
>>> especially true if you start using "odd" hardware such
>>> as the pcHDTV card. ( 5v pci2.2... another story )
>>
>> Can you elaborate on this? AFAIK most if not all mainstream motherboards
>> support 5V PCI. In fact only some workstation/server motherboards with
>> no 32-bit (64-bit only) slots don't. There are some 3.3V only 32-bit PCI
>> slots but they are extremely rare in x86 land. Or is it the rev 2.2 part
>> that is problematic?
>>
>> Bolek
>
>>
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