[mythtv-users] new rig ... help with specs

[Johnny]

> 1. Among the major / widely supported brands of motherboards, which
> are considered well-built, highest quality, long lasting, etc?
> Gigabyte seems to have several models available for AMD; I am
> interested in something really solid... comments?

Gigabyte and Asus are generally safe. The customer reviews/ratings on
Newegg are great for this kind of info.

> 2. should I care about AMD X2 versus higher priced Phenom X3 or X4
> CPU?  I want plenty of extra power (just for HTPC, not gaming) but not
> plenty of extra heat The max stress on this system I can imagine would
> be taping 1 show in HD, watching another at the same time, while
> something is transcoding and let's say mythfilldatbase decides to run
> too.  Want a CPU that will be a great HTPC for at least 5 years.  But
> I assume the more CPU cycles, the more heat in the case (see below)?
> What AMD CPU will strike a good balance here?

Pretty much any modern dual or more CPU will be fine. Especially if
you are using hardware decoding/deinterlacing like nvidia's VDPAU.
Most people would say a quad core is over kill. If you are going to be
recording and commflagging like 4 HD shows and transcoding then a quad
core might make more sense.

> 3.  Would it help my hard drives live longr if i move up to a full ATX
> motherboard and give them room to "breathe"?

Google published a great paper discussing driver failures, based on a
study of like 100,000 of their drives. Heat wasn't really an issue. In
fact cold drives failed more.

> 4. One of the boards I am considering has onboard NVIDIA 8300 graphics
> (see asus below), another has ATI radeon 3000 onboard graphics.  Are
> onboard graphics a Bad Idea?  I see threads like this one
> (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=125246) and get a
> little scared.

I would go with Nvidia. Mythtv .22 will be released in the next few
weeks. With that you will get standard support for VDPAU. The 8300
won't be able to do the highest end deinterlacer with HD material, but
many people are plenty happy with the other deinterlacers like
Temporal 2x.