Mailing List Archive: SMP and harware Recommendations

SMP and harware Recommendations

Sep 19, 2002, 12:19 PM

Post #1 of 3 (1844 views)

I've been silently watching MythTV for a week or so now and have read all of the mailing list archive so far but one of my main questions hasn't been addressed so here goes ...

I've recently built a new system so my old Dual PIII 450 has become available for playing. I was thinking of using it for a MythTV box and have been wondering if it will be up to the task.

Specs.
Dual PIII 450MHz 100MHz FSB
703MB PC100+ ram
13GB 7200rpm (I think) ATA66 disk (for now)
Soundblaster PCI 128
ATI AIW Rage128 (I know they don't play nice)

My questions are

1. Will MythTV take advantage of the Dual processors?

2. Since the AIW card isn't going to be nice would a GF4MX and an ATI TV-wonder be a good pair (I'm trying to stay near $100 to replace the AIW and tigerdirect.com has both) or would I really be better off with the GF4MX and a Hauppauge card?

2a. If I should get a Hauppauge card (which I'm not against since I grew up near Hauppauge on Long Island) which one should I get?

I think that's all for now. Love the looks of the project. Nice to see a project under such active development.

-Keith

Re: SMP and harware Recommendations [ In reply to ]

ijr at po

Sep 19, 2002, 12:36 PM

Post #2 of 3 (1832 views)

Permalink

On Thursday 19 September 2002 03:19 pm, mythtv@mcgerald.homelinux.com wrote:
> My questions are
>
> 1. Will MythTV take advantage of the Dual processors?

It should, things are fairly heavily threaded -- 3 threads each for both
playback and recording. Of course, most of the really heavy computational
stuff takes place in 1 thread each on record and playback, but having a
dualie should still help.

Memory contention/cache issues may impact performance, but I wouldn't think
it'd be all that bad. Depends on how the kernel schedules things, how much
it bounces around between CPUs, etc.

> 2. Since the AIW card isn't going to be nice would a GF4MX and an ATI
> TV-wonder be a good pair (I'm trying to stay near $100 to replace the AIW
> and tigerdirect.com has both) or would I really be better off with the
> GF4MX and a Hauppauge card?

Yeah, the gf4mx and an ati tv wonder should work.

Isaac

Re: SMP and harware Recommendations [ In reply to ]

kleeschu at mindspring

Sep 19, 2002, 4:14 PM

Post #3 of 3 (1772 views)

Permalink

I have to mention something about the Geforce4MX...it has an integrated tv-out chip...not anything familiar like the bt869 which is used extensively on a lot of the other nvidia boards....I bought one and I am disappointed with it due to the tv-out chip's lack of configurability. The tv-out tool "nvtv" won't work with it because the tv-out is integrated into the GPU chipset on the GF4MX. I used the closed source driver from nvidia with it,which works OK...BUT there was no option to tweak the scan modes or anything like that. Something to think about when it comes to the GF4MX. This does not apply to other GF4's though, just the MX. If someone knows better, please clue me in :)

Chris

----- Original Message -----
From: Isaac Richards
To: mythtv-dev@snowman.net
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: [mythtv] SMP and harware Recommendations

On Thursday 19 September 2002 03:19 pm, mythtv@mcgerald.homelinux.com wrote:
> My questions are
>
> 1. Will MythTV take advantage of the Dual processors?

It should, things are fairly heavily threaded -- 3 threads each for both
playback and recording. Of course, most of the really heavy computational
stuff takes place in 1 thread each on record and playback, but having a
dualie should still help.

Memory contention/cache issues may impact performance, but I wouldn't think
it'd be all that bad. Depends on how the kernel schedules things, how much
it bounces around between CPUs, etc.

> 2. Since the AIW card isn't going to be nice would a GF4MX and an ATI
> TV-wonder be a good pair (I'm trying to stay near $100 to replace the AIW
> and tigerdirect.com has both) or would I really be better off with the
> GF4MX and a Hauppauge card?

Yeah, the gf4mx and an ati tv wonder should work.

Isaac
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