Hello all,

I've been out of the hardware game for some time and am a bit overwhelmed at all the choices now. I know you guys have alot of specific PVR experience here, so I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

Here are my needs:

- I want to use the Silverstone LC11M case,
- am worried about fan noise,
- will be using MAME and bittorrent more than actual encoding
- but want one capture card with the option of having two at some point,
- am not worried about money necessarily (if something costs 100$ more and is THAT much better, fine)

For a mobo, I was looking at
BIOSTAR TForce6100-939
but it seems that is very problematic with Linux drivers.

Another direction I was considering would be to use a mobile Pentium or Celeron. Is this common?

I assumed my first capture card would be a Hauppauge PVR-x50.

I would probably be putting 1GB of RAM in.



What mobo+cpu combos are the coolest(temperature) and least problematic driver wise?

Thanks for any advice.

Start with these links:
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=HardwareConfigs
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=PickingComponents
http://www.silentpcreview.com/
The test will cover all of this material, so pay attention.

You haven't said whether you're just after SDTV or want HDTV capability too.

The "Venice" core and later AMD64 chips really do run "cool & quiet" given a good heatsink. Kind of overkill for just SDTV, but these days nearly as cheap as a decent Athlon XP.

If you just want SDTV 1Gb of RAM is very substantial overkill.

For socket 939 motherboards I recommend going with an Nforce3 or Nforce4 chipset. Others will work, but the NForce[34] is very well supported and will make it utterly painless.

The two 80mm fans in that case may want replacing with the quietest ones you can find, because undervolting them may not move enough air and thus cause an overheating issue.

My current recommendation for a single PVR card is the PVR-150 model 1045 at roughly $85-$90 shipped.

Don't forget to take some care in selecting your HD to get one that doesn't run hot and noisy.

Supposedly the next release of the nvidia linux drivers will support that mobo. How far away that release is i dunno :S (or how buggy they are...)

I would go for a cheap nforce 4 with a quiet chipset fan (if you can find one)

Thank you for the replies! I'm sifting through those links, though I think I did read these a few days ago.



Sorry, HDTV is definitely in order, though I'm only interested in ATSC. I want a free tv box, basically. I assumed HD-3000.



Overkill is okay, as long as we're talking about quality and not some heat pumping steroid machine...



Is there not one mobo to rule them all?



what about the PVR500 since I want multiple streams?



I was thinking about just bending over and using Sage TV until the Linux drivers catch up?



Any recommendations?


Thanks again.

I'll weigh in on this subject since every machine I've built in the last 2 years has had AMD chips in it (at least 24).

The Venice core chips (amd64 3200+) do indeed run extremely cool. Even with the factory (somewhat noisy) heatsink they idle at 85-93F. I switched to Thermaltake's Bigwater SE water cooling system and even under 100% load this chip never breaks 100F. As long as the motherboard supports CnQ (which every Nforce4 does AFAIK) you're good to go. The Thermaltake will fit inside a standard ATX case or outside of one, leading the coolant tubes through a dummy PCI slot thing with holes cut in it. The fan is 120mm and has a dial to control the speed..but I haven't noticed any difference in cooling between high and low..and at low I think it's giving me about 21db of noise, the power supply fan is much, much louder. Also you might consider a Sempron64, the socket 939 models should be out very very soon.

Stay away from weird chipsets like the Tforce in linux. It's some new innovation that has almost no support outside of Windows, thanks to Nvidia dragging their heels on the next linux driver release. Even then it'll take time to get rolled into the next kernel. So stick with a standard, well-known Nforce4 board that fits your budget. Personally I love Gigabyte boards and despise Abit, but to each his own, it boils down to personal experience more than anything. The Gigabyte board in my personal computer is a full-sized ATX board, socket 939, model k8n Ultra SLI. The chipset cooler on it is a passive heatsink, so this board would probably be adequately quiet in a HTPC like the Silverstone. It's an expensive board and it'd definitely be overkill for what you need.

As far as ram goes, I prefer Geil, the kind Newegg sells in pairs. The pc3200 Geil ram is probably the best bargain out there right now, about $89 for a gig and it's absolutely flawless with low latency, plus with pairs you get the benefit of a double-wide memory path (if your motherboard supports dual channel, most if not all Nforce4 boards do).

For the Hauppauge card..dude you got me there. I'm lucky to have my single PVR250 working the way it should. I don't know about the wacky PVR500 and its questionable support. If you want to go down the safe, well traveled road, get as many pvr250's as you need, and grab that HDTV card you were talking about.

Steer clear of anything with the word Intel on it. Intel = hot. Intel = loud. Intel = greedy with electricity. Tom's Hardware stuffed a Pentium M in a HTPC case before and they were surprised that it kept overheating and had to modify the case to get better cooling. What a shame. I can reach in and grab my waterblock (and my old heatsink before) while Sandra throttles the crap out of this chip and it's barely warm to the touch. Sorry to sound like such a fanboy but I think it applies to HTPC stuff.

Thanks, afrosheen.

Current drivers aside, which of these motherboards would be preferred?

BIOSTAR TForce6100
http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.as ... e+6100-939

Foxconn 6150K8MA-8EKRS
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/products_ ... K8MA-8EKRS

K8N Neo4 Platinum/SL
http://msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.a ... m&class=mb

Asus A8N-VM CSM
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3& ... odelmenu=1

Jetway A210GDMS-Pro
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813153027

First off i would rule out the jetway board completely. ATI do not have a good history of supporting linux.

The MSI board doesn't have on board video, but is completely suported by linux.

Out of the remaining 3 I would go for the Asus one. It has VGA & DVI built in to the mobo!