[mythtv-users] Intel/ION Lack of PCI Slots & Mythtv

[Raymond Wagner]

On 10/2/2009 05:03, Greg Cope wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Looking at a replacement Myth box - present one is 5 years old and is
> displaying tin rot issues (random lock ups/reboots).  My disks are
> also 4 years old.  However I am not one to replace will-nilly.  I also
> need to do an OS update.
>
> The ION platform looks like a good low power solution (this is
> important to me as I pay the bill), however with the Atom Intel seem
> to have put the kybosh on having more than one PCI slot - grh.
>    
There is at least one MicroATX Atom board 
(http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=_t&hl=zh-TW&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.magic-pro.com%2Fproduct%2Fsocket775%2FAM330.htm&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&history_state0=), 
but I don't know of any such ION systems.  That would be fine for a 
backend (with poor commflag/transcode performance), but with no hardware 
decoding, its a bit underpowered for a frontend.

If you're concerned about power consumption, modern processors 
automatically downclock themselves pretty heavily, and with idle 
spindown of hard drives, it should not be difficult to get a system down 
below 50W consumption when idle.  If you want to manually 
underclock/volt it beyond what the chip already does, you can drop it 
even lower.  Add that you can standby your system when not in use, and 
the power savings of using an Atom/ION system drop to a few dollars per 
year.