[mythtv-users] Recommended CPU speed

[Chris Thompson]

Mitko Haralanov (voidtrance at comcast.net) wrote:
> I am planning on getting the CHAINTECH 7NIF2 motherboard (and using the
> hw mpeg decoder of the onboard GeForce4 MX). I am also planning on
> purchasing a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 and a AVerMedia M179 (I want to be
> able to record two streams at the same time). I plan to use the PVR-250
> for recording and the remote interface.

I have a 7NIF2 that I use as a frontend (My capture cards are in the back
end in the basement), and there's a warning I'll give you.

The 7NIF2 is a great board, but it's incredibly finicky about ram. If you
get an Athlon chip that operates on a 266Mhz bus (And I don't know if the
2100+ does or not) you'll be tempted to just put PC2100 DDR266 ram in it.

First, the 7NIF2 does not support ECC ram, won't even POST.

Second, if you do go this route, my board defaulted to 400MHz FSB and it was
nearly impossible to get the board to boot enough to get into BIOS to set it 
down to 133/266 to get any sort of stability at all. It's entirely possible
this is due to my RAM and not the board, but I was unable to successfully
get into BIOS with a stick of PC2100 in it without setting the jumper on
the board to be 100Mhz fsb, booting to bios to set it to 133 and not 200,
and then moving the jumpre back.

Third, I had massive instability problems with my 7NIF2 with a 1600+ and a
stick of non ECC PC2100. The board couldn't even successfully boot a CD
version of Knoppix without CRC errors on the initrd uncompress.

To try to fix these last issues, I stuck in a stick of PC2700 and a Barton
AMD 2500+, and now the board works like a charm.

I have no idea if these last two items are that the board doesn't like
266Mhz based chips, or if I had bad chips. I do know, however, that ECC ram
is right out.

_______________
Chris Thompson