[mythtv-users] Fronted advice

[Craig Sanders]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 06:03:45PM +0000, Damian wrote:
> I'm doing some computer juggling. Planning on giving the kids the old
> 'tank' of a machine that's in the garrage at the moment (working as an
> over powered frontend), so I'm looking for a new frontend machine.

a similar discussion came up on another list i'm on recently, and a
good, cheap powerful and very power-efficient option is an ASRock
QC5000-ITX

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/QC5000-ITX/

it costs about $62 USD from newegg....and the wifi version is $145AUD
in australia from various shops (non-wifi version doesn't seem to
be available but the wifi card is removable so you can get back the
mini-pcie slot).  i would expect similar pricing in the UK.

($145 in .au isn't too bad when you take into account the exchange
rate, shipping, GST, and the fact that australia has decent consumer
protection laws and statuory warranties)


this product includes the motherboard and CPU (AMD FT3 Kabini A4-5000
Quad-Core APU). built-in graphics are AMD Radeon R7 HD 8330. it has
6xUSB3.0, 6xUSB2.0, 4xSATA3, a realtek 8111E gigabit nic (so needs
non-free firmware) and 2 x DDR3 DIMM sockets (max 32GB non-ECC).

all you need to add is a mini-itx case + psu, RAM, and a small SSD
to install the OS and mythfrontend on. includes VGA, DVI, HDMI and
DisplayPort 1.2 sockets.

it uses a max of 15W under full load.

if you're not happy with the Radeon GPU (which should be more than
adequate for myth playback), it has 1 PCIe x16 slot and 1 x mini-PCIe
slot so you can put in an nvidia card, but that will obviously use more
power.


IMO, these are nearly ideal for all sorts of home server applications
from myth frontends to RAID or ZFS NAS boxes (more PCIe slots would
be nice but if you don't need a third-party graphics card, you can
install a good cheap SAS card into the PCIe slot or a multi-port NIC or
whatever)...it has way more CPU grunt than any off-the-shelf "NAS" and
very low power use.



craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>