What I'm planning to buy:
- Antec Solo (ATX, Geen PSU, Zwart)
- Seasonic S12-380, 380W (ATX12V 2.0)
- Scythe Ninja Rev.B SCNJ-1000P (Socket 478/775/754/939/940/AM2)
- Nexus Real Silent D12SL-12 (120mm, 22,8dB, 3/4p)
- Gigabyte GA-M55S-S3, nForce 550 (ATX, PCI-e, Sound, LAN, SATA II, RAID, 1394)
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (AM2, 2x2.0GHz, 512KB, 400MHz Bus, 65W, Boxed)
- 256MB x 2 (512MB) PC5300 DDR2, CL5 (Kingston KVR667D2N5K2/512)
- Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS, 500GB (7200rpm, SATA II, 16MB)
- MSI GeForce 7100 GS 128MB DDR2 (PCI-e, DVI, Passief) NX7100GS-TD128E
- LG GSA-H10N 16x (Dual-layer)
- Toshiba MCE Remote Control
Decisions:
I'd like to use my case fan as cpu fan too. The scythe ninja seems perfect, due to the perpendicular fin positioning.
I would like to have some room for adding (DVB-C) tuners. This means I need full height PCI slots. So no SFF cases with microATX boards for me . NB: I'll need to find another motherboard, since this only has 2 PCI slots. Yeah.. and 4 PCI-e, but there are no DVB-C cards for such slots.
The motherboard needs to be Linux and MythTV compatible. So for example the nForce 430 MCP chipset is a no go due to sound, APIC and IRQ problems.
[edit] *seems* to be working now with current kernel versions.
A single core of the CPU needs to be about as fast or faster than my current P4 Celeron 2.4GHz. Since I'll be using software encoding with my old tv-card. This is a bit guestimate I made with the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, but I think it is about right. The recorder keeps below 60% cpu on my current system, so I can drop a bit with the addition of an extra core. btw, I don't really need the AM2 socket architecture, but it seems cheaper than a C2D + mobo (?).
My MythTV system needs a good s-video tv-out. It seems like very few full ATX motherboards have a tv-out, so jumped for a dedicated video card. nVidia of course for the excellent Linux compatibility. DVI with HDCP support is a plus for a possible HDTV in the future. This was the cheapest passive card that has s-video and DVI.
[edit] btw, this card doesn't do HDCP. And HDCP support is nonsense for Linux systems. Quite improbable that commercial software will be made for Linux that requires this, if you look at the time it took for *some sort of* commercial DVD player software to actually arrive on Linux (last year or something). Cracked HD-DVD/Blueray codecs probably won't have the necessairy licence to use the HDCP 'feature' anyway.
The DVD+-RW writer is high ranked and relatively silent according to CHIP.de testresults. Seems about right, but maybe there is something better?
Finaly: A big and silent disk is always nice on a harddisk recorder. And the MCE remote is more userfriendly than my current remote that links to my tv-card.