Good evening all!

I've spent the better part of 3 workdays as well as my weekend doing a ton of research on my MythTV product. I certaintly respect the need to do research before making a post but I feel I have hit a dead end and would like to ask a direct question.

I am designing a two box setup. A dedicated frontend and one backend.

My question is quite simple. I have heard much about "1 ghz per tuner card,etc" but it is always ambigious about if that is for the backend/frontend. It's almost as in the same breath I've heard that the backend requires minimal cpu power.

What would be acceptable processor speeds/ram for a backend system (for sake of argument, with 2 HD tuners).

Same question for frontend (not sure of tuners as that perplexes me..) please


Here is the curve ball! If I can get a cable box with firewire, will that change the afformentioned specs?

Thank you very much for your responses in advance!

2 hd tuners (firewire is the same as all hd content is basically just dumped to disk) would only require maybe 500mhz or less if all you are wanting to do is record and never playback on that machine. the frontend however will need about 3G to playback those hd streams. The only other thing to watch out if you are really trying to squeeze by with very low end backend is that I belive most of the hd cards require pci2.2 or somthing like that, so it's one other area to be ware of.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Thanks for the heads up! It's now a question if I would rather squeeze it all into one box or use spare parts and put it into a closet

well doesn't really matter as most of the noise is going to come from cooling a 3G+ machine and that has to be the frontend.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Hrmm.. I was under the impression that one of the largest advantages to seperating the two was that you could take some strain off of the front end and thus take advantage of some of these 'quiet' pc's to run your frontend.

Would I really need to go with a 3g+ machine to run HDTV ?

I better start putting a few more pennies away

well that's what everyone hopes for, but it's just not that way. decoding hdtv is one of the most demanding computing applications any home user will be doing (other than maybe the latest and greatest game). There are reports getting it going with less, but 3G is the safe bet. some say 2.6 2.8 is good enough, but you're scrapping the bottom of the barrel, and anything else gets to taking proc power and you could have problems.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Well, having said that and doing some research I think I'll just combine the front and backends. At the risk of asking one of the most hated questions : Do you think the following hardware would be ample to do both?

Abit AS8 w/ P4 3.0ghz (800mhz)
1 gig DDR
eVGA FX5200 AGP8x

I haven't decided on the type of tuner cards yet as I need to find out if I can access the firewire port on the cable box I'll get (no service, no HDTV as of yet) but I imagine it'll be the pcHDTV for the other card.

I run a pvr250/firewire/pchd3000 fe/be on almost identical hardware, so yes that should be fine.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets