I had bought a Hauppauge PVR-500 a few months ago with the plan to build a MythTV box. My first attempt at this resulted in a 866MHz PIII with a 10GB hard drive running xubuntu being converted into my first MythTV machine. As you can imagine, the computer was a bit too slow for it to work well and the hard drive was far too small to be useful for recording programs.
I’ve finally gotten around to making a good effort into the myth box, due primarily by this deal on Tiger Direct. The price ($400, plus $24 shipping) was excellent, considering the AMD Athlon FX-60 processor alone is $399 at Tiger Direct, and $525 at Newegg. The Tiger Direct package deal included an OEM Athlon FX-60, Ultra CPU cooler, Ultra V-series 500 watt power supply, Asus A8S-X motherboard, and Ultra X-blaster case. My main desktop machine has an FX-55 chip in it currently, so I stuck the FX-60 into my main machine and am using the FX-55 for the MythTV box. This just leaves me to buy RAM and another hard drive to have a very nice MythTV box. The old MythTV box has been retired, and will most likely spend the rest of its days crunching SETI@home work units. The case that came with the deal is useless to me since I have everything rackmounted… to ebay it goes!
The only snafu with the new FX-60 in my main machine is that my BIOS doesn’t know what processor it is. I have a Asus A8N-SLI mainboard, which supports the chip. Its not a significant issue, as the processor runs the way it’s susposed to, however the BIOS reports it as “AMD Athlon: Model Unknown”. I checked for BIOS updates, but there are none… oh well. Its a lot faster than the FX-55, so I’m pleased with the purchase.
The MythTV install on the new box is great, definitely runs better than with the old PIII machine. Its running on Xubuntu and once I get a bigger hard drive, I’ll reinstall and do a more detailed analysis.
Built my first Myth box using a Epia M10000 board and a PVR-350. It was built into a Technics CD player as cases did not exist at the time. My current box is a recycled Compaq EVO D510 2.4Gh P4 and 1g ram, 500 hd, for capture cards using a PVR-350 and a PVR-500. I upgraded to the Compaq due to M10000 getting zapped and wanting to put in a second tuner. For both units I used Mythdora as the OS and build is currently 5.0
That particular computer is no longer my myth box due to needing the power for something else. My current MythTV machine is an older dual 1GHz Pentium III server motherboard with 2 50GB SCSI drives. It’s not the greatest, but is powerful enough to handle doing two recordings at the same time from the PVR-500. The only limitation that I want to change at the moment is the size of the hard drives, but its not that big of a deal at the moment. I have also moved away from using Xubuntu as the base and am using Mythbuntu. Functionally its pretty much the same, but Mythbuntu makes it a bit easier to install and configure. I have not used Mythdora, but I assume its the same idea as Mythbuntu.