[mythtv-users] MythTV as a Gift (Hardware Recommendations)

[John]

David Segall wrote:
>> The Antec fusion is a good silent case, it has 120mm fans and the PSU is 
>> quite silent.
>> Drawbacks of the fusion is that it´s mATX only. Many cases including the 
>> fusion are quite deep with all connectors and stuff attached to the 
>> back, take that into the equation.
>>     
> I'm also happy with my Antec Fusion case.
>   I´ve replaced the antec fans in my fusion with nexus fans to quiet it
>   
>> further.
>> For harddrives I´d go with Western Digital GP drives, I´m using samsung 
>> drives today but they vibrate a bit to much.
>>     
> I don't think vibrating hard drives should be a problem because the case 
> comes with soft mounts for the drives.
>   
>> Microsoft mediacenter remote with Ir-sender, newer fusion V2 has 
>> integrated ir reciver but no sender.
>>     
> I have the old Fusion case and followed the instructions at 
> <http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Volume_Knob_on_Antec_Fusion> to 
> get the VFD working but the volume control still does not work. There is 
> a note on the page about the newer versions of the case.
>
>   

Another vote for the Antec. It is nice, but make sure you measure up 
before you buy one, it is very deep (front to back), and you will have 
all your VGA cables etc coming out of the back.

I bought the V2 silver just before Christmas, and with after a lot of 
messing, I have it working with a genuine windows MCE remote. I was used 
to a hombrew serial lirc receiver, and it took me a while to convince 
myself that I needed to buy an MCE remote. I have about 20 remotes from 
all sort of devices, and none of them generated anything from the 
integrated receiver. Eventually clicked that the integrated receiver was 
preprocessing all the IR commands, and was only passing on the MCE 
compatible ones. Once I had an MCE remote it all worked well. When you 
come to configure the standard MCE remote lircd.conf does not work, but 
you can find a lird.conf specifically for the fusion floating around 
(google). Both the knob and the remote are working fine on my machine.

As to fans, it is quiet but not silent. I ended up changing out the 
supplied Antec PSU (very good quality about £40 on its own ) for a near 
silent one I had. Same goes for the 2 big 12cm fans and the CPU heatsink 
fan.

So my current build is:

Antec Case - + MCE remote
Asrock 775i65g -- cheap conversion mATX board, takes AGP and DDR(1) 
memory, but fully supports core2duo.
80G Seagate drive (its only a frontend) -- but I also have it working as 
a diskless frontend booting from the backend - nice but not good for a 
gift ;-)
A 6200 nvidia AGP  Card, for excellent s-Video to a sony crt tv.
Core2du0 e4300.  I'm in the UK, and am able to watch BBC-HD on this 
setup (bit wasted on the SD-CRT).

Bit off topic, but I came up with a cunning plan for the core2duo. The 
board allows over-clocking, but not under-volting. So I over-clocked the 
e4300 from 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz, but then turned on speedstep, (same as 
cool'n'quiet on AMD), and set it so that it was always on the low power 
setting, that "underclocks" it again to 1.8GHz, and runs the cpu at 
stock speed but lower core voltage :-).

good luck

John