AM2+ motherboard with support for ECC RAM for media player / server
Unbuffered / Registered obviously.
I'm building a couple of Debian / MythTV based home media players /
servers and want low power consumption and noise, at the moment I'm
leaning towards
CPU 45W Dual Core Athlon
Motherboard ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI
RAM 4GB DDR2 ECC RAM as fast as I can find [0]
GPU Radeon X800, X1900, X1950 [1] or on-board [2]
HDD (system) Toshiba MK8037GSX or some other SATA laptop drive
HDD (Data) Western Digital 1TB Green Power or the Samsung ITB F1
and some DVB-C card
The ASUS boards are the only ones I can find with the traces / BIOS
support for ECC RAM but this one doesn't have FireWire on-board which
I'd like, can anyone suggest another mATX system with USB2, SATA2, ATA,
FireWire, Digital sound IO and ECC RAM support that would meet my
requirements? [3]
Does anyone know weather an Athlon X2 4850e (2500MHz) or Athlon X2
BE-2400 (2300MHz) (both 45W ) is going to be capable of decoding H.264
1080p in Blu-ray quality? [5]
How about when we get IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) and MC
(Motion Compensation) video acceleration in RadeonHD?
Thanks for any help.
[0] at the moment the fastest ECC sticks I can find are DDR2-800, I
can't find any 1066s and would like some headroom
[1] I haven't decided which GPU to go for, I'll have to do more research
into how well R500 and R600 GPU are handling video playback at the
moment, I have a feeling that for simplicity I may have to get an R400
GPU as an interim measure and then when RadeonHD matures a bit I'll
switch to either the On-Board or an R500 based discreet card [4]
[2] for the first time in my life I'm considering on-board graphics,of
the 780G chipset.
[3] not necessarily AMD but preferably
[4] Because the R600 Unified Video Decoder (UVD) has integrated DRM
we'll probably never get access to it, in which case any
hardware-assisted video decoding the Linux world sees will be in the
same form as the R500 stuff, I'm unsure weather this will mean that
R500s will ultimately be "better" than R600 but I suspect they'll be the
same, either way for Home Theater PCs I'd really like someone to start
putting Mobility Radeon GPUs on PCIe cards.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=955&num=1
[5] up to 40Mbit/s, probably not is my feeling from reading round, I
think an X2 6000+ (3000 MHz) at 89W or 125W can just do it.
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