Hardware Choice

I've thought long and hard about the hardware to go in to my Knoppmyth box. The key requirements for me were:

• Low power consumption
• Enough processing power to watch live tv (HD or SD), timeshift, watch dvds and watch divx flawlessly
• Integrated TV out on the motherboard
• Affordable
  

Given those requriements, my first system used a VIA EPIA-M 10000.



This was a tiny system, with integrated everything (even the CPU was included). It is one of the lowest power consuming systems money can buy. The problem was that sometimes it lacked the sufficient grunt to get the job done. An upgrade gone wrong meant the end of that board... oops. The silver lining in this cloud was that I had the perfect excuse to upgrade...

Initially I considered a Pentium M based system. Motherboards for HTPCs that support these laptop CPUs are becoming more and more common. Compared to a Pentium 4, the Pentium M processors use less than half as much power (21 to 40 watts compared to 100+ for some P4 systems). A system based around one of these CPUs would be great, but I just wasn't able to find one cheap enough. The CPU alone would have cost around $300 Australian.

Moving over to the other side, I started having a look at what AMD had to offer. Sempron processors are very affordable, and some of the new socket AM2 ones are pretty quick too. The big drawcard for me though was the low power usage of these processors (around 60 watts). They use less power than Atholon and Pentium 4 processors, and only slightly more than the much more expensive Pentium M processors. I managed to pick up an AM2 Sempron 3200+ for only $78 Australian.

With the perfect price-performance-power ratio achieved in the form of the Sempron I then had to find a good motherboard to go with it. I'd heard good things about the Asus M2NPV-VM micro-atx board so I decided to give it a go. It was a great choice, and ended up only costing $130 Australian. I only have basic sound and TV equipment, but it appears to have every audio and video output type under the sun on it. On the inside of the case its fantastic too, with both SATA and IDE for your disks. I think with my case the positioning of the first IDE connector makes it very tricky to insert the cable - for some reason the board's designers thought it would be a good idea to have it facing perpendicular to the usual way. It isn't as small as the mini-atx VIA board, but it still fits nicely into the micro-atx case I have. I picked up a 2*512mb Corsair DDR2 533 pack to go with it for $102 Australian.

So the total upgrade cost came in at only $310, just a little bit more than the cost of the Pentium M processor I was considering. The all-important thing is that the resulting system works, and with only a little bit of fiddling (which is all documented on this site) I was able to slap together an almost-perfect Knoppmyth system with R5E50. The other components in the system are:

Dvico FusionHDTV DVB-T Plus tuner card
2*Western Digital generic 250GB SATA disks
Generic DVD+- Burner
Generic Micro ATX case