Hi,
I see notes about many new people having ordered / already purchased this or that with the long term goal of building their own KnoppMyth system. That's great, just be sure to read everything you can first to see what others have experienced. Here are hopefully, some ideas to help the end goal become real. Maybe a way to learn a little too.

Also I see 200 ~ 300 gig drives (100 plus hours viewing?), and the list goes on, almost over loads the mind For the first time user, I would suggest to pick up a 20 ~ 40 gig drive, what ever that is available for a bargin price and install R5A16 on that drive. Smallest drive I have used was 8 or 10 gig. ( about 30 minutes record time )

Many may have a second older machine in a closet that would be useable for testing , experimenting and learning. I used my main machine and connected the future "knoppmyth" 40 gig drive. That was back with R4V2 I think. Anyway, that poor drive has seen dozens of installs, upgrades, re-installs as I keep poking a sharp stick at the inards.

Here are a couple of what will play for ideas. Only special requirement is to boot from cd.
Compaq, 350 mhz,128 meg mem, 16 gig hd, Compaq cd rom, on board audio, 3com netcard on borrad svga Sis. No tv card, tried PVR350 but old pci bus makes it get real hot. Probably way to slow for a bttv. I moved a running drive with recordings to the Compaq and then did an upgrade. (that way I could test the play of tv recordings)
Results, plays the recordings, barely. will rip music cds and plays them well, weather works, news reader works, phone registers, and works very well for proof of concept. Audio is isa and requires special tweaking as alsaconf don't store settings properly.

HP Kayak? 266 mhz, (Kalmath) 256 meg, Maxtor 51530U3 16 gig hd, HP cd rom, realtek netcard, sb-16 audio, on board svga Cirrus GD5465 didn't chance the PVR card because of pci bus as mentioned above. Did a straight install. Added some tv recordings after.
Results, were the same as with the Compaq.

Dell GX260 works well, Dell GX1 was ok,

My home "production machine" is an old Intel 440BX. Here are some dmesg notes from that box, (got to love ssh so I could just do copy & paste)
Detected 601.623 MHz processor
CPU0: Intel Pentium III (Coppermine)
hda: Maxtor 6Y060L0, ATA DISK drive
80 gig hard drive (~30 hours viewing) info not from dmesg
hdc: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 8192kB Cache, UDMA(33)
eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex
Found an iTVC15 based chip
PCI audio card (forget the flavor)
This box gives me PVR350 tv out with very watchable video using R5A16. (R4V5 recorded noisy files)
I haven't gone into the vcd's & dvd's or burning of opticals yet, I build in steps. Issues, basicly one unexplained issue and I posted that incident (no comments yet) about auto expire. I consider it minor as it did not cause failure. Oh yes, It also runs mozilla & thunderbird for email, ftp is also handy, and a printer is next.

My test machine is an e-machine from Wal-Mart, CPU0: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1600+, with 512 meg. Almost worn out the ribbon swapping drives in & out

IThe "production machine" has a high WAF and when I am ready to go the HD add on requiring more horse power, I will most likely have the go ahead blessing, (very important if I want to see 35 years of marriage)!

May be there are some usefull ideas for some future KnoppMyth builders here. What ever, if there are questions, please post the hardware you are using and version (R5A16 right?) along with the questions. The guys here on the forum are very good, but seem to have troubles reading minds a great distances

Mike