I'm building my first mythtv setup, a FE/BE system. I've done some research, and here is what I'm thinking. If you see any potential problems, please let me know!

Capture card: pcHDTV 5500
TV-out card: Hauppage pvr-350
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 2.4 GHz
Memory: CORSAIR 256MB
Hard Drive: 320GB
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster 16 PCI

I really appreciate the help.

Motherboard? That can affect compatibility...

My bad!

Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X Deluxe

Well...you're going to need a different motherboard. The Asus A7 series is a socket A motherboard (old-style Athlon), which is why I had a hard time finding it when you said you wanted an Athlon X2 CPU. Your motherboard will need to have an AM2 or AM2+ socket.

If you're set on Asus, I would go with the M2N-MX SE Plus board. It has a GeForce 6100 video chipset which is well supported. eWiz has it for $48.33.

Given a board with built-in video and the capabilities of your television, you may or may not need the Hauppauge card if you are getting it only for the TV-out. Given how expensive those cards are, it would be cheaper to get a video card with an SVideo port instead.

I would ramp up the RAM to at least 512 MB. You could get away with 256 MB on a frontend-only system, but with the amount of work that a backend system does, it will be swapping into and out of disk a lot with 256 MB. I have 512 MB in my backend system and it rarely swaps to disk - but I only use it as a backend.

Your CPU choice should have more than enough horsepower behind it. You probably could tame that down a little bit if you wanted, though the X2 4600+ has a reasonable price tag on it.

Your sound card should work just fine. Depending on your needs, you might be able to forego the extra card and just use the motherboard's onboard audio.

Last item is the hard drive. While 320GB is reasonable, you probably will be wanting more space relatively soon. You might want to consider moving up to 500 GB; it'll run you about an extra $20.

You did not mention a case, nor did you mention where you are going to be storing your system. Will it go in your entertainment center (in which case you'll be concerned about the noise of the system) or in another room (in which case it won't matter much)? Not all cases are created equally, nor are they equally quiet. Personally, I have found CPU fans to be intolerably loud, too...look for a fan no louder than 24 dB (and even that is pushing it, depending on where the case is located).

Good luck! And be sure to post any other questions that you have.

As cheap as RAM is these days, I wouldn't go less then 1Gig since your doing HD FE/BE. Also if you can get a MB with onboard sound, you'll save a PCI slot for another capture card down the road.

Happy building!

Alright, that's great info to know. Thanks for the tips guys!

Just a few thoughts:

I have the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe MB and am happy with it. It has on-board sound (both digital and analog), so you don't need a sound card. You might be able to pick up an older CPU off ebay.

Are you going to do analog capture with the PVR-350? If not, I would recommend getting a nVida video card with TV out. Probably a lot easier to set up.

What TV inputs do you have? If possible, you probably want to get a video card with HDMI or VGA rather then the SVIDEO/Composite on the PVR.350 card. This is particularly true if you want to view HD.

As for memory, 256M is minimal. I ran with 256M until about 6 months ago. I finally upgraded to 1G as I started to notice some swapping.

If the box is going to be in the same room as the TV, silence is important. Check out your components on http://silentpcreview.com/. Particulary, CPU, fans, HD and PSU. Also, get a fanless video card. No need for the latest and greatest 3D support.

Cheers,

Allen

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

@alien - I noticed in your sig you're running a 440 MX. What version of the nvidia drivers did the R5.5 setup scripts install for you and does it flickers or look good?

You can see simply by quitting the frontend, opening a shell and typing:



Here is the output from my R5F27 box (waiting on a new HD to upgrade to R5.5.):

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

It will install 96.43.05 if the card self identifies to lspci properly. it looks fine on a monitor, no idea about a TV.

As tjc states, I'm running 96.43.05.

I'm running 1280x768. No flicker and the display looks great (especially now I have am running VGA to a flatscreen). I'm running it over VGA, so there are no flicker controls that I am aware about. I haven't used TV out for a a year now, but when I was, I could control flicker with nvida-settings and it was almost indistinguishable from any other source (slightly pinkish, but I could correct that in nvidia-settings).

As a down side, I have noticed artifacts with my current setup that look like the colour depth is not enough (I'm running 32bit). Dark scenes, especially fog or almost black, show lines between colour changes instead of a continuous gradient. I haven't been able to experiment much on that yet to narrow it down.

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

As soon as they deliver my new HD I'll mirror the drive and upgrade to R5.5 with my TV as the monitor. I have my fingers crossed that the 96.x driver will work. I remember that I had to install the older version depicted in the screenshot above on R5F27 for the TVout to look right.

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

graysky - Since this really seems to have you concerned, let me suggest something... Boot with the R5.5 CD and exit the menu to a shell prompt, then run:

If you don't see anything after the "-ra1" you'll probably have to force the use of 96.43.05, otherwise it should be fine. We haven't had any complaints from people using that legacy driver on MX4 cards yet. BTW - If you see multiple lines it means you've got more than one VGA device.