[mythtv-users] Upgrading or replacing my frontend hardware?

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Sun Sep 27 20:47:46 UTC 2009


My trusty SFF frontend&slave, an Aopen XC Cube with a 3ghz Pentium 4 and an
Nvidia 6200 AGP video card is getting a bit long in the tooth.  It still
works, but feels sluggish compared to modern machines, and it can't play
many of the h264 HD videos I come upon without skipping a bit.

So I see a few options and wonder what people's thinking on the routes
available today are.   There are no geforce 8 and above cards for AGP, though
they can be had for PCI.   To use PCI I would have to remove the pvr-150 card
in the PCI slot, but that's not so bad because there's not much left on 
analog cable, and the firewire port does the recording from the cable box.

You can't really get new motherboards for SFF systems.  This mobo has SATA
and firewire and two spdifs which is good, but only older ddr and agp.

So options include:

a)    Give this system more life with a PCI based geforce 8400 or 9400 video
        card.  In theory, I should be able to play all those videos quite
        nicely with VDPAU, right?   There does not seem to be a PCI card with
        HDMI output but I can survive doing audio on its own wire.

b)    Buy a micro-atx case and mobo, possibly with integrated geforce 8200 or
      9300 chipset, do vdpau from onboard video -- small and low power.  Toss
      on a cheap core 2 duo.

c)    As above, but forget about onboard video, get a pci-e slot and put on
      a dedicated but low-power video card.

d)    Buy another SFF barebones -- small and light and low power and usually
      pretty quiet.   But no upgrade ability, again.  Note that firewire
      is a must.


I am intereted in current popular choices.  If it works well I can just
drop in my old drive and Jaunty should largely recognize the new hardware
and hit the ground running.


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