[mythtv-users] Fronted advice

[Damian]

On 30/03/2015 03:45, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 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
Thanks for that Craig