I'm figuring that with the number of bays in the Antec SLK1650B I can watch the sales and pile a bunch of quiet GB in there when there's a bargain. Oh look, those nice quiet 200Gb Baracuda drives on sale for $0.40/Gb! Heh-heh-heh...

Great posts guys. I'm thinking of building a dedicated MythTV box myself. I 'm learning towards the Cooler Master ATC620C case and Biostar M7NCG-400 motherboard combo. Currently MythTV runs on a spare drive running Fedora2. Ususally I prefer Slackware but I couldn't get all the dependencies satisfied correctly. Instead I just followed Jarod Wilsons HOW-TO and it was pretty easy. I'm running a 800mhz PIII with a Hauppauge 350 card. For the most part it works well. I do have some minor latency issues attributed to my Asus mobo's Via chipset. The dedicated MythTV box is my next project. I did a segment a couple weeks back on the linux link tech show (episode 53, last quarter of the show):
http://www.tllts.info/archives/

Keep up the good work

Pat

Well, I was down to my final cut for the upgrade machine (see below) and about to place the order at NewEgg when I ran into a little problem.... Seems like AMD has dropped all but the fastest Athlon XP's from their product line, and as a result anything slower than a 2800+ Barton is getting much harder to find...

Now I'm thrashing again. Should I pick up an Intel Northwood 2.4Ghz chip and i865PE motherboard which is now about the same price? Go for a current socket 939 Athlon 64 chip and Nforce3 Mobo with the idea of handling HDTV? Wait for the Nforce4 mobos?

Opinions? Feedback?

Upgrade Parts List

Antec Black ATX Mini Tower PC Case with 350W Power Supply, Model "SLK1650B" -RETAIL (Supposed to be nice and quiet)

ABIT "NF7-S" nForce2 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A CPU -RETAIL (SPDIF and SATA support for adding extra drives)

APOLLO nVIDIA GeForce FX5200 Video Card, 128MB DDR, DVI/TV-Out, 8X AGP, Model "BLOODY MONSTER 3 GEFORCE FX 5200" -RETAIL

Kingston ValueRAM Dual Kits 184 Pin 512MB(256MBx2) DDR PC-3200 (DDR400 is now as cheap or cheaper than DDR333!)

Seagate 200GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive, Model ST3200822A, OEM (In addition to the second drive from the old box)

LITE-ON SK7551 Wireless Keyboard w/ pointing device PS/2 86keys -RETAIL

NEC 16X Double Layer DVD±RW Drive, Black, Model ND-3500A BK, OEM (I'm tired of not having a burner right in the box)

Arctic Cooling CPU Cooler For AMD Athlon Socket 462 up to 3400+, Model "Copper Silent 2M" -RETAIL (a very, very quiet CPU cooler)

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton", 333 FSB, 512K Cache Processor - OEM

Some Thoughts

I have the some of the following equipment that you are thinking about purchasing

Antec SLK1650B
Abit NF7-S
Seagate 200gb

Also have

Antec Sonata

Looking at both cases side by side I can see that the Sonata is a little nicer case quality wise. It has a better matched power supply that is more quiet. It also has a slightly higher quality drive system.

Here is the kicker since your close to a purchase. Fry's Electronics has an ad right now that is from 11/5 - 11/9. They are advertising Sonata case for $59.99 after rebate and this is an excellent price. Also have Seagate Barracuda 160GB for $54.99 after rebate ($0.35/Gb) Ouch! This ad may be limited geographically to places where the ad is published so it's worth looking into it.

Consider Athlon 400FSB cpu will be a better match if available it's worth the stretch over the 333FSB cpu....

Price wasn't really the deciding factor, it was the stupid door in front of the drives. Most of the other Antec cases in that size range have it and it's a deal killer. The other models that don't have a door are much bigger. 8-(

Just how much louder would you say the SLK1650B is?


Yeah, the Boston area is not Fry's territory, which is a shame because they have some amazing deals.


That was the way I was leaning initially. However for the price of a 400Mhz FSB Althon XP, I can pick up a somewhat more potent "800"Mhz FSB P4 and still have more headroom for upgrading the CPU if I want to do HDTV. Thus the quandry...

The Antec 350W(SL350) power supply that is in the case does not use the same technology that as the one that is in the Sonata. If you are
planning on good components like Seagate and good cpu fan I do not think that the difference is all that much. My preference is the Sonata case if the price is the same. But that is not usually the norm and you have an asthetic preference with the front door.

The CPU issue is a bit more thorny as you point out. Here is a good link that provides some more insight for HDTV recording.

http://www.linuxis.us/linux/media/howto ... video.html

I would look into XV versus XVMC and Xine versus Mplayer. There are some posts on the PCHDTV forum

If HDTV is in your future, heed my advice and go for a fast P4 instead of an Athlon. Don't get me wrong - I have eight computers in my house, and seven are Athlons! But the problem with HDTV and Myth is this:

XvMC doesn't work. It's buggy under Myth to the point of not being useful. I used every nVidia card I could find, and every driver. It just isn't ready for Prime Time under Myth. When XvMC support is fixed up and working, I'll be at the head of the parade shouting hurrah, but for now you just can't count on it.

So we're left with Xv, which is much more processor intensive. We have to get the best cpu for THIS job. Unfortunately, that processor is the P4 with hyperthreading. I dunno why, but every benchmark I've read shows the P4 superior to the Athlon for video transcoding/decoding. (Even the AMD web site and their own AMD64 benchmarks!) And that is born out by my experience with an Athlon XP 3000+ and an nForce2 m/b. The P4 edges it out in decoding performance -- enough to make stutters disappear.

Oh, and I like Sonata cases, too! But for my HTPC I went with the Silverstone case. Very nice looking if somewhat expensive (and large). Watch out for the DEPTH of these cases. If you have an "entertainment center" with a hard back, you may be buying and returning several cases.

Joe Barnhart

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were you able to get it to work with the 3000+ I'm asking cause I am getting a pchdtv card, and I already have an amd motherboard, besides the fact that intel is just ridiculously overpriced even discounting the fact that I would have to buy a new motherboard, and I'm on the verge of being completely broke as it is.

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Xsecrets

I think you guys bring up a good concern regarding the hardware requirements.

First, the PCHDTV is only a terestial (llocal stations tuner), it has no onboard MPEG2 compression like the PVR250/350.

Second, Conexiant has released the CX25874/5 chipsets for HDTV. Up to this point it is not available in any PCI board that I know of so far.

Third, without an onboard chip to handle MPEG4 compression it takes way too much hardware that is not really optimised for the task..

I would like to know if an ATHLON XP can handle just being a frontend and let the backend recording be done on a different backend. Any ideas what are the minimum hardware requirements for that?

Thanks

well I may be completely mistaken on this, but It was my understanding that terestrial ATSC (HDTV) is natively in MPEG2 format, and merely needs to be dumped to disk.

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Xsecrets

Xsecrets is right on. HDTV is broadcast as an MPEG2 "transport stream" (TS). It is already compressed, so capturing the program is really pretty low-stress. The disk has to be able to stream about 2M bytes/sec per capture card -- not too hard with today's computer. The real heavy hitter is the decoding of MPEG2 to video for display, i.e. the "frontend" process. Since it has to be done in software instead of hardware (because XvMC doesn't work), it puts a heavy load on the frontend system.

I was able to decode and play HDTV streams using an Athlon 3000. I didn't have much headroom left over, so the picture got jumpy when commercial flagging started. You'll have to recompile the frontend with Athlon-optimized settings, because every percent helps. If you're feeling industrious you might take a crack at getting XvMC to work!

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Here's the mb and processor I got from Fry's. The discounted price at Fry's was $250, but without processor fan. I also paid CA tax. This price is $274 with free shipping, and includes a fan.

Abit combo

Joe Barnhart

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well not that I don't trust you or anything, but I will definitely be taking a crack at getting xvmc to work.

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Xsecrets

The AS8 mobo in that combo is kind of a strange mixture, LGA775 socket with an i865PE chipset - WTH were they thinking? If you're going LGA775 you might as well match it with an i9x5 series chipset. Especialy since the all the Prescott core CPUs run so blasted hot, perform worse than the equivalent Northwood core chips, and you're not going to have a lot of CPU upgrade head room with the i865 to get past the break even point. On the other hand I wouldn't buy the current crop of i9x5 chipsets either since they've got serious transitional chipset limitations.

Sigh... Maybe I'll just wait for the socket 939 Nforce4 mobos to appear and get a nice zippy Athlon 64 ...

I think you're too harsh, tjc. IMHO the Abit AS8 is the perfect "transition" m/b. Since I'm investing big $$$ in a P4 I want to make it as future-proof as possible. The LGA775 is Intel's path and I think it's prudent to go that route now. But, as you point out, the 9x5 chipsets don't have much to offer right now -- especially for a Myth user! We got no PCI-X boards for anything we care about -- TV capture, HDTV capture, etc. But this will no doubt change over time.

Since all my stuff is PCI and AGP it just doesn't make sense to go with a 9x5 board now.

BTW, Prescott performance is pretty good (800FSB and 1M cache) and I haven't noticed any cooling probs with the combo so I dunno about excess heat. I only went with a P4 because I need it for decoding HDTV streams in software. Otherwise I'd use an Athlon or AMD-64.

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