Motherboard for MediaPortal server ONLY - can an ATOM 330 do it? (1 Viewer)

[ryan20021982]

I've been searching for an atom motherboard for quite a while now, but no succes. I want to have a PCI slot and a firewireport on it.
- PCI for my RAID5 medialibrary config
- firewire for 2 floppy dtv s2's

You could use a micro atx board like this ECS 945GCD-M motherboard and add a firewire card

Newegg.com - ECS 945GCD-M(1.0) Intel Atom 330 Intel 945GC Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU Combo

Board has a pci-e 16x, pci-e x1, and a standard pci slot

 

[iancalderban]

I'm working on the same problem as you. how to build the best low power consulption tv-server only box. take a look on silentpcreview.com. Problem with atom boards is they are almost 100% mini-ITX, which gives you not enough PCI / PCI-x slots for your tuners, and you might want RAID as well, etc. so the min size you want for this server is micro-atx.. there are only one or two atom micro-atx boards (such as the 945 mentioned above) but I believe the idle power consumption on that 945G chipset is supposed to be pretty poor. So I am thinking low power AMD chipset micro-ATX (740G maybe) and 45w athlon X2. but haven't decided yet.

 

[alexeix]

I'm interested in the same kind of low power set-up, so based on what the last poster mentioned, how are these components?

AMD Athlon LE-1640 2.7GHz Socket AM2 512Kb Cache OEM Processor (45w) - £30 and

Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 740G Socket AM2 onboard Graphics 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard - £44.

Looking at power consumption is a whole new area for me, so if I'm using a 45w CPU and a motherboard with onboard graphics, what sort of overall power consumption could I expect for my PC? Let's say I would add a low power HDD and a DVD drive.

Also, would the onboard graphics on that motherboard be good enough for running HD TV? I want to use it as a media server, but also to run it connected to a TV.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

 

[iancalderban]

for uk hdtv, assuming you mean BBC HD, which is 1080i. De-interlacing 1080i, to send 1080p to a TV, is pretty much the hardest thing for a HTPC to do (harder than bluray playback which is what vendors and annoyingly the testers always quote). you want it to be able to deliver vector adaptive deinterlacing which is the best quality option in ATI land.74GM almost certainly doesn't have the gas for that.

I have a 780G machine which I wasn't happy with the 1080i on, I use a discrete gfx in that now.

785G IGP may in the right setup (HT3 CPU, right memory). I am testing that at the mo. there's plenty of reference on this subject, have a google around avforums, afsforums, anadtech, etc.

power/design requirements for the htpc client and the server functions are often quite different.
Ian

 

[alexeix]

I read an entry on a thread on this forum, which said someone was using an Atom dual core setup with a USB DVB-S2 tuner and they were seeing great results.
Is the Atom/ION combination that good???

Since my original posting, I've found some components which may be more suitable:

AMD Athlon II X2 235e 2.7GHz Socket AM3 2MB Cache Energy Efficient Retail Box Processor

Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H 785G Socket AM3 DVI VGA HDMI Out 8 Channel Audio MATX Motherboard

 

[orencha]

I would also like to build a low-power dedicated TV-server, and have been looking lately on Intel Atom boards as an option. However, I could not find a single Atom board with more than 1 PCI / PCIe slot. Can anyone suggest a suitable board?

 

[funkstar]

I haven't seen any Atom boards that are not small form factor. if you need more expansion options then you m ight be better with a cheap low powered AMD setup. You could probably get away with under volting and underclocking as well to save a bit of power.

 

[Tallone]

I would also like to build a low-power dedicated TV-server, and have been looking lately on Intel Atom boards as an option. However, I could not find a single Atom board with more than 1 PCI / PCIe slot. Can anyone suggest a suitable board?

Zotac's NM10 DTX board with the newer Atom 510 effectively has two PCIex1 slots. 6 onboard SATA ports too.

Not that I could find one when I was looking.

 

[orencha]

Thanks for the advice on AMD. I'm not familiar with AMD hardware, so I looked at AMD chips and found only few CPUs with less than 10W power consumption, and they look very weak comparing to new Intel Atoms.

I also looked at Zotac's DTX but couldn't find anyone selling it locally.

What about PCI risers? Is it possible to use one of those single-PCI mini-ITX boards with a PCI riser, and connect two PCI TV-cards? I remember such configuration in my old Asus Pundit-R... Does anyone here have experience with such configuration (mini-ITX + riser)?

 

[glenn 1990]

Hi,

I bought an Point of view atom d510 micro atx motherboard for my tv server.
The board has 2 PCI, 1PCI e and 1 mini PCI e.

When streaming HD channels , the cpu usage is around 15%

My server consumes around 25-30W when streaming or recording.