Bob wrote:
Ron Johnson wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 04/28/08 21:41, Bob wrote: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]Why ECC?Prolonged uptime and reliability without having to go for full Opteron with Registered ECC RAM.GPU Radeon X800, X1900, X1950 [1] or on-board [2]Why not nvdia?1. I want to reward AMD for the recent opening up of their GPU specks2. none of the other GPUs match the on-board one on the 780G chipset in terms of performance for power consumption, at a rough guess with the on-board GPU, a 45W CPU and a Laptop HardDrive or net boot I should be able to get the whole systems power to 30 or 40 W idle and maybe 70W under load, if I can do that then it can be passively cooled with no fans and potentially no moving parts at all.HDD (system) Toshiba MK8037GSX or some other SATA laptop driveHDD (Data) Western Digital 1TB Green Power or the Samsung ITB F1and 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]It'll have the oomph, but as you mentioned in your footnotes, might not have the software to decode it,I meant will it have the power if the only assistance it gets is with scaling via XV which already works for GPUs <= R400 in the Radion diver [6] but I don't think does yet in RadeonHD?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 researchinto 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 thatR500s will ultimately be "better" than R600 but I suspect they'll be thesame, 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.[6] and maybe R500 too as Dave Arlied has been running the Radion driver on R500 hardware, but he has a powerful beard so it's probably not a solution I want to rely on for my everyday video playback needs quite yet.
sorry no snippageI've reedited and reposted this question to MythTV-users they're very good at multimedia stuff and should be able to answer the question on CPU grunt at the least, and may have some useful suggestions on the rest.
I'll update the list if I get anything useful back. What's the etiquette on CCing one list on a discussion in another?