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Thread : Super Budget Build!
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LVL: ????
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LVL: ????
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Ah, a MythTV box I assume...very nice. I have some experience in this area and I'll try to help you out.
The case is fine. I'd not trust the PSU farther than I could throw it though. Get the case, toss the PSU and spend and extra $40 and get a nice 300 watt Seasonic or other HIGH-QUALITY PSU. 300 watts is more than enough for an HTPC plus a good quality PSU is an absolute must, lest it fail and take out the entire system.
That's a nice CPU and very appropriate. You could also go for the slightly more-expensive and even cooler-running Athlon 4450e or 4850e, but the 4600+ already is a very cool-running chip and your case isn't so small that the little bit of added heat over the 4x50es would be noticeable.
Very appropriate and Linux should play nicely with them.
I am running MythTV on a Debian Lenny x86 install with a full GNOME desktop with 256 MB RAM and it is just enough RAM, so 2 GB is plenty. You do lose about 30% of your CPU's performance with only one stick of memory versus two, so I'd suggest 2x512 MB or 2x1 GB over a single 2 GB stick.
Fair enough. You probably need all of 5 GB for the OS + swap (if you care to do suspend-to-disk.) I do have a few suggestions: 1. You need a way to output video to your TV. The board has an HDMI and a DVI connector, which will work if you have an HDTV. If you have a 15-year-old tube TV like me, you have to have a composite-out (single yellow cable), S-video, or component (3 colored cables) for your TV output. You can get the correct video-out by either getting an RGB-to-whatever-output adapter or getting an inexpensive PCIe video card with the right output. 2. If you have an HDTV and intend to work with HDTV signals, you will need to get a little better CPU to do the processing and increase your budget. My X2 4200+ and a Radeon x1900GT frontend/backend has about 50% CPU utilization for 5.0-6.0 Mbps MPEG-2 720x480 SDTV at high quality and my old 2.2 GHz P4-M and Radeon M9000 frontend has about 90-95% CPU utilization for the same image settings. I'd suggest an X2 5600+ (either 2.9 GHz/2x512 KB cache or 2.8 GHz/2x1 MB cache) as a minimum AND get yourself an NVIDIA 8400GS PCIe card. The NVIDIA cards will do XvMC which lowers CPU utilization when displaying the video while the AMD/ATI cards and IGPs do not. You may also consider going to an Intel platform as an E8500 + G31 board + 8400GS would be probably the most potent HTPC gear out there that won't completely trash your budget or turn your case into a furnace. About the HDTV playback you noted: Tom's only tests with Windows ( 3. You probably want a remote control- the MS Media Center remotes work pretty well. I have the silver "mceusb2" one and it works nicely with Linux. 4. You also need a tuner card somewhere. If this is a frontend-only box, then you probably know how you are going to connect the box to the backend. 802.11g wireless is only suitable for SDTV or mediocre-quality 720p HDTV as you can really only expect 802.11g to throughput 15 Mbps or so reliably without dropping too many packets. If you are doing high-quality 720p or any 1080, use 802.11n or better yet, 100 Mbps or gigabit Ethernet. It's not *that* hard to run Cat5e cable, assuming you are allowed to make modifications to the walls. 5. Do you have a cable box or satellite receiver? If you do, you may want an IR blaster or a direct RS-232 link to do channel changing. In that case, you will want a serial port on your motherboard and yours does not have one. You can of course add a PCI or PCIe serial port card and it will work, but it's cheaper just to get one on the board in the first place. My board does NOT have a serial port and I'm hoping the second PCIe serial port card I ordered isn't DOA so I can change the channels on my cable box via its RS-232 link. The IR receiver in the Motorola DCT-2244 is absolute garbage but the RS-232 link works flawlessly. Message edited by MU_Engineer on 06-16-2008 at 06:20:56 AM --------------- UNIX is user-friendly- it's just picky who its friends are. DRM is slowly killing personal computing, one Sony rootkit and TPM chip at a time. |
) and the 780G has HW-accelerated playback a la XvMC on Windows but NOT on Linux. So the playback will require much more CPU under Linux than with Windows on that board, at least until AMD gets XvMC working on Radeon hardware or the community does so from AMD's recently-released GPU HW specs. NVIDIA gear should perform similarly under both OSes. |
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. Dual core is the way to go.