[mythtv-users] [Bulk] Re: What processor?

[Christian Szpilfogel]

Tom wrote:
> At 07:31 PM 9/3/2009 -0500, you wrote:
>> For someone planning to build a myth box for the first time, what 
>> processor should one use, assuming one wants to built a fairly robust 
>> combination FE/BE with going significantly into the overkill range? I 
>> want to have plenty of horsepower for new developments in MythTV, but 
>> hey, I'm not going to play games on it that demand extreme 
>> overclocking and liquid cooling and dual $500 video cards.
>>
>> I have an HD HomeRun on order from the jungle bookseller, but still 
>> in the planning stages for the rest of it. I'm planning on using 
>> Mythdora. For the moment, I need s-video output to the TV, but later 
>> it will be HDMI when I join the real world and get a decent TV.
>
> Thanks all, as usual, quite a few very prompt responses to my 
> questions- this is a great group. I expected a few people to mention 
> Intel Core2 cpus, but no one did. Not a good way to go?
>
> The comment about ...almost keeps up... was scary. I don't want to 
> spend a ton of money on this project only to find out that something 
> I've bought is a critical limiting factor.  On the other hand, I don't 
> want to buy a nuclear missile to deal with a pesky housefly. But then 
> again, this is the ancient dilemma facing most system builders, isn't it.
Hi Tom,

People on the list are often hobbyists and thus have different 
objectives. Some are trying to get the best solution for the least money 
(including power consumption), others are trying to build budget 
systems, and others (like me) are building for integration with other 
systems. I prefer not to optimize my platforms (e.g. Front ends) because 
in reality the technology (including CODECS) are evolving rapidly. So I 
have systems which are generally overbuilt. That said I don't think I 
have spent more than C$600 on any of my front ends.

A year ago, I chose Core2 E8500s on all the front ends. I chose this 
because it clocks out of the box at 3.16GHz and can be overclocked if I 
need it. This can handle just about any H.264 and VC-1 stream you can 
throw at it even at very high bit rates. VDPAU will off load much of 
this when it is generally available in Myth 0.22 but in the mean time I 
have just used my raw horse power to decode these codecs for now; I'm 
using 0.21-fixes. If new CODECs come out I am generally in good shape to 
deal with them. For a dedicated front end, a dual core will be plenty 
because at the moment the decoders will only use one core; so the second 
core will be generally running non decoding processes.

My backend is on a dedicated server which runs a bunch of the other 
stuff for me (email, web serving, file storage, zone minder, music 
server/jinzora, vmware, etc). My backend does all of the transcoding as 
well. In this case I use a core2 quad (Q6600) so that I can  run 
multiple processes/tasks in parallel minimizing cross process impacts.

Just for fun, my master backend is running as a vmware guest on my main 
server and I run a slave backend  native on the host OS so that I can 
get access to my PCI based tuner cards.

Hope this helps.

Christian