My New Mythbox


I'm building a new machine to be our main MythTV frontend / backend. I want to be able to decode HD content - both standard MPEG-2 ATSC captures and also MPEG-4 h.264 encoded content, I want it to be pretty quiet and I need it to be available for the fall.

I decided to embrace a much larger footprint case (no pun intended - see photo above). I went with a Silverstone LC17B. It's a pretty big case - 17" x 17" x 7" with a black anodized aluminum front panel. It should look right at home next to my receiver which is also black anodized aluminum up front. The case has a good amount of space: 6 - 3 1/2" drive bays, 2 - 5 1/4" bays, and plenty of space for a full size PSU and either a flex ATX or micro ATX motherboard. In the shot above the motherboard and PSU are in place, but the CPU heatsink and fan are missing.

I picked up an inexpensive PC Chips A13G+ motherboard with on-board NVidia 6100 graphics, an AMD 5000+ Athlon XP 64 X2 CPU, 2 G of PC6400 DDR2 RAM and a ThermalTake A4022 TR2-R1 heatsink & fan. The CPU and memory were only $80 after a $30 rebate from TigerDirect. The case seems to have pretty good cooling and is very solid. It has a pair of 80mm fans at the right rear of the case and the PSU goes in the other side of the case with the top of the fan facing the vent on left side of the case. (My PSU was a gift from a good friend and is a very quiet Antec with a fan up top and on the back.

I put the whole thing together and loaded MythDora 5 onto it to checkout the components. At first I couldn't get it to sync up with my Sony 46" LCD, but after going back and getting the NVidia proprietary driver, it recognized it just fine.

My next task will be to figure out how to migrate all my existing data from my current main frontend / backend machine and get this into place under the TV on stand. In theory this shouldn't be too difficult, but since I'm jumping up to a new version of MythTV (version 0.20-2 to 0.21) there could be some database migration headaches. First I need to get some other things done around the house, getting this machine online will be my carrot!