HTPC upgrade, advice appreciated

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Aleksi
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HTPC upgrade, advice appreciated

Post by Aleksi » Mon Mar 03, 2008 8:22 am

Hi guys,

so I'm planning to upgrade the HTPC shown in my signature. The system is used for DVR, watching movies, playing music and also as a NAS. I'm running Debian Linux with MythTV, so any comments regarding drivers etc are welcomed. My current plan is to get the following components:

- Athlon AM2 X2 BE-series CPU. One of the BE-series CPUs, only 45W TDP and should be enough for running HD material withouth any HW decoding (correct?). I have a Ninja Mini that's going on here and should run fine as passive.
- 2GB DDR2
- passive Asus ATI Radeon HD3650. Passive heatsink, has 2 x DVI and TV-out. HDMI available with an adapter (should be included) and also supports SPDIF sound with the HDMI. AFAIK, Linux support for HW decoding for HD material is non-existing, but hopefully that will change with time. I may run dual-boot with WinXP, so atleast that should support some of the decoding features.
- 2 x 750GB HDD (probably Seagate 7200.11). I'm planning on 1TB of storage space, accompanied with some mirrored storage space for important stuff (pics etc) and mirrored OS.

I'm using a Technotrend DVB-C card with a CI-reader. The PSU is a 380W Seasonic SII in a Silverstone LC20. Also I haven't figured out whhich motherboard I should get.

Any thoughts on how well the CPU will do in my intended use? Any thoughts on possible problems regarding Linux drivers and the GFX card?

Thanks for looking!

jessekopelman
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Re: HTPC upgrade, advice appreciated

Post by jessekopelman » Mon Mar 03, 2008 2:32 pm

Aleksi wrote: - Athlon AM2 X2 BE-series CPU. One of the BE-series CPUs, only 45W TDP and should be enough for running HD material withouth any HW decoding (correct?).
Depends what you mean by HD materials. If you mean stuff you got from bittorrent, then probably yes. If you mean stuff off of a HDTV tuner, then yes. If you mean stuff off of a Blu-Ray disk, then no. Add that HD3650 (with proper driver/software support) into the equation and everything is good to go.

Aleksi
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Post by Aleksi » Mon Mar 03, 2008 10:22 pm

Thanks for the reply Jesse.

It always seems that you end paying too much for latest technology (quad core) or then you get stuff that is slowly phasing out, but is cheap (dual core).

Also thought about moving my main PC (X2 3800+) to function as my HTPC, but I really don't have any use for quad core in my daily usage (surfing the net, playing Eastside hockey manager :D).

The 45W would indeed be good choice regarding the low power consumption, but the whole Linux driver support (or the lack of) for UVD etc is really puzzling me. Any idea what the future plans are for the Linux drivers and HD encoding?

jessekopelman
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Post by jessekopelman » Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:49 pm

Supposedly, AMD is making a big push to release better Linux drivers. Some distributions may not include the new drivers, though, as they won't be GPL. Still, I'd think you could still add them yourself. How serious AMD is about this has yet to be seen. I believe Intel has been fairly good with getting out Linux support for the 3D functionality of their IGP. Since the newer models support HD acceleration, hopefully this will carry over. If both Intel and AMD make such an effort, will Nvidia be far behind?

Zinj
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Linux drivers

Post by Zinj » Tue Mar 04, 2008 2:31 pm

If you're interested in more on ATI graphics cards and drivers under linux, check out Phoronix.com. It's a linux site and they've had reviews of both recently.

Zinj

Aleksi
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Post by Aleksi » Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:52 pm

I've actually spent a few hours browsing Phoronix these last few days and reading their Linux GFX driver articles etc... and trying to figure out what would work. Yes, AMD seems to be concentrating on Linux drivers and apparently the 8.xx drivers seem to be quite decent.

Well on the other hand, it doesn't matter which card I get (ATÃ

Aleksi
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Post by Aleksi » Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:16 am

Well, atleast once the wait was worth it. I ordered the new AMD X2 4850e, 2.5GHz and 45W, a passive Sapphire Radeon HD3470 along with two Seagate 7200.11 750Gb. The prices came down a bit during this wait and also got the new AMD processor.

autoboy
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Post by autoboy » Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:37 am

You made a good choice. All great stuff.

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