This is an edited repost of something I sent to debian-user list last
month with little result, so apologies to those who, like me, are
subscribed to both.
I'm building a couple of Debian / MythTV based home media players /
servers and want reliability + low power consumption and noise, at the
moment I'm leaning towards
CPU 45W Dual Core Athlon64
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
I'll probably go for ATI/AMD graphics because
A: I want to reward AMD for the recent opening up of their GPU specks
B: no other GPU matches 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.
The ASUS AM2+ 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 if the only assistance it gets is with scaling
via XV which already works for GPUs <= R400 in the Radion diver [5] but
I don't think does yet in RadeonHD? [6]
How about when we get IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) and MC
(Motion Compensation) video acceleration in RadeonHD?
Thanks for any help.
[0] ECC for prolonged uptime and reliability without having to go for
full Opteron with Registered ECC RAM, the fastest ECC sticks I can find
are DDR2-800, I can't find any 1066s and would like to for 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 (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, (pixel or vertex shader) I'm unsure if
this will mean that R500s will ultimately be "better" than R600s 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] 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, with my puny stubble, want to rely on for my everyday video
playback needs quite yet.
[6] 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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