On Aug 1, 2005, at 9:02 PM, Quentin Whitmyer wrote:
Ok, I am starting to put together a initial list of items I am
going to buy for my MythTV box. At moment I plan on going with the
all in one solution, however in the future I might get a second
little box for the front end.
So far I have:
2 Hauppage PVR 350
Maybe 1 pcHDTV HD-3000 for Future
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 4400 or 4800
A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard, I like the AI-Cool Pipe option and it
supports the AMD Cool 'n' Quiet Tech. for fans
I think the only reason you would need this much CPU is to handle
software decoding of HDTV streams. Since you have the HD3000 board
chances are in the future you'll want a card that can do HDTV output.
For that I would look at the some of the Gigabyte or eVGA cards found
here: http://www.pcalchemy.com/index.php If you don't have any HDTV
sources now (OTA by chance?) consider skipping on the HD-3000 and
video card to save money. Chances are in 6-12mo new HDTV tuners will
be on the market with better quality. Worse case, you pick up a used
HD3000 off ebay on the cheap :)
Smart move on the AMD cool'n'quiet choice. Make sure you setup your
Linux distro of choice to take advantage of it.
I am defiantly open to some suggestions on changes?
I still need to pick out the Case, Power Supply and a few fans. I
am thinking about going with a Fan-less Power Supply for noise
reduction and I could use some suggestions on which fans to look into.
Do any of you suggest a case. I have found several built for noise
reduction and looks since this is going in the living room.
In addition to pcalchemy.com, check out http://
www.silentpcreview.com. Based on reviews from that site and elsewhere
I'm going with the Seasonic S12-330 which I expect to handle my basic
setup. You may want to consider a larger PSU than this depending on
how many hard drives you plan to put in the case.
I also was thinking about a fanless PSU but decided against it after
reading information on SPCR. The key thing that sticks in my head is
that with a silent PSU you need quality case ventilation to move the
heat out that the PSU fans would normally be moving out for you.
Having looked at several HTPC cases from Ahanix, Silverstone, and
Uneed none of the full sized ATX cases score well on airflow when
compared midtower cases.
In the end I've decided that having fans isn't such a bad thing as
long as they are controlled. The case I'm designing will end up
having voltage controlled 5 fans (1 CPU, 1 GPU, 2 Case, 1 PSU)
however I still expect it to be nearly silent. The plan here is to
use the special fan connections on the Seasonic along with simple
inline voltage controls and temperature monitoring to only spin the
fans as fast as needed. Apple did it on the dual G5 2GHz systems, how
hard can it be? ;)
Hope it helps.
--
Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
AIM: BlueCame1
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