New HD Rig critique wanted. Please.

[broderp]

My PC died, HD and CPU gives me errors every day. So it's time for an update.


Here are my potential specs:

• Intel Core-2Quad Q8200 2.33Ghz 1333FSB 4MB LGA775
• ASUS P5Q3 C2Q 16000FSB 4DDR3 6SATA 2PCIe ATX
• DDR3-13333 (PC010600) 2GB 128x8 CL8 (4GB total)
• DVD-RW/Blu-Ray ROM SATA
• MS VISTA PREMIUM
• SEAGATE 1.5TB 7500RPM HD

I am considering two (2) HDHR from Silicone Dust as my tuners with Time Warner Cable of Ohio.

My Sony HDTV can tune the channels without the cable box (45.1, 7.1 etc.) so I hope the HDHR can as well.

Any thoughts or issues I may not be seeing? It's been a while since my last build, (Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz that I currently use with 3 tuners.)

This PC will dedicated for TV recording/ watching, with the occational web surfing, but 99% of the time it is used with SAGETV 6. Do I have enough mustle for the 4 potential HD streams?

My network is also a GB LAN as well.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[alfi33]

What video card will you use?

I think if it were me, I'd spread my recordings over a couple drives rather than just 1 large drive....especially if you're going to run Comskip.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by broderp

My Sony HDTV can tune the channels without the cable box (45.1, 7.1 etc.) so I hope the HDHR can as well.

If your Sony can tune the digital channels, your HDHR can as well. HDHR can't do analog though, so make sure none of the ones you can about are coming in analog on the Sony.

You should also list the video card you're planning on using. Will it be the same one you have now?

I don't have any experience with a single PC record/playback setup, so I can't say too much there.

Cheers,
Slipshod

[PiX64]

You may want to do a little more research on the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I bought 3 of them for my RAID array, and only after i spent a day banging my head against the wall i came to find out that they have severe overheating problems, as well as firmware issues. When i had the drives, the firmware issues caused the drives to stop responding, hang, and the OS to stop recognizing them. This was roughly 6 months ago or so, so they may have been fixed since then....

Just something to look into.

~Mike

[broderp]

Originally Posted by alfi33

What video card will you use?

I think if it were me, I'd spread my recordings over a couple drives rather than just 1 large drive....especially if you're going to run Comskip.

I'm looking at a "lower end" card,

• SAPPIRE PCI-E2 HD3450 512MB DDR2/64BIT/DVI/VGA

Reason being, it will only be used for displaying -right? the cards I use for recording will carry much of the brunt of conversion etc... Right?

I like this card also because it's got HDMI out, so with a little luck, it should be close to plug and play. I'm a lso a fan of ATI.

I'd like the drive idea, I will see how feasable it will be. Thanks!

[broderp]

Originally Posted by Slipshod

If your Sony can tune the digital channels, your HDHR can as well. HDHR can't do analog though, so make sure none of the ones you can about are coming in analog on the Sony.

Good point, I guess I can use ONE HDHR (with two tuners) and perhaps on of my current tuners, PVR-500 for the anolog stuff.

Now, the one thing I'm not 100% sure of is if Time Warner will be sending out ALL channels in digital. They may not be anolog, but if they are digital, the HDHR should pick them up....right?

[broderp]

Originally Posted by PiX64

You may want to do a little more research on the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I bought 3 of them for my RAID array, and only after i spent a day banging my head against the wall i came to find out that they have severe overheating problems, as well as firmware issues. When i had the drives, the firmware issues caused the drives to stop responding, hang, and the OS to stop recognizing them. This was roughly 6 months ago or so, so they may have been fixed since then....

Just something to look into.

~Mike

I heard of this as well. I will see if I can exchange it for a WD. I picked it up because I got it on sale for $135.

I'm actually using it now, but can return it with 30 days. So far it's been really quiet and cool to the touch. My dying HD is also a Seagate (500GB) its starting to make a racket.....I better look into it some more.

Thanks for the heads up.

[alfi33]

Originally Posted by broderp

I'm looking at a "lower end" card,

• SAPPIRE PCI-E2 HD3450 512MB DDR2/64BIT/DVI/VGA

Reason being, it will only be used for displaying -right? the cards I use for recording will carry much of the brunt of conversion etc... Right?

I like this card also because it's got HDMI out, so with a little luck, it should be close to plug and play. I'm a lso a fan of ATI.

I'd like the drive idea, I will see how feasable it will be. Thanks!

Actually, because you are talking about capturing Clear Qam, there will be nothing for your capture cards to convert....because the signal is already digital. This means the specs that your system will need to record are a lot lower than what is needed to playback your recordings.

You'll want a video card that can do some hardware acceleration....which the HD3450 can do. However, I would not count on it being "plug and play." It took a lot of tweaking to get my HD3200 to work well.

[blueroom]

My 3300HD was just fussy enough I dropped the $60 to get a fanless 4550.

[pjpjpjpj]

As mentioned above, the video card only matters for watching on the PC. If you were watching on an extender, you wouldn't need much of a server at all (see my sig). It's just the watching on the PC - and comskip if you add it - that takes more PC "beefiness".

I'm fairly certain that TWC Ohio (You must be Dayton area... 45.1, 7.1... ) does not send anything unencrypted except your locals. So if you are thinking that you will get all the "standard" cable channels with the HDHR, you won't. You'll need an analog card (SD), or a digital card/cable box/IR changer (SD), or else a HD-PVR setup (with cable boxes) (for HD).

Another thought is that, although your Sony TV gets those channels on QAM, that is a single coax cable into your TV... if you have an HDHR, it will get split into two tuner inputs (~3.5 dBa loss through a split), and if you have two HDHRs, it will get split into four... that could be enough signal loss to keep the HDHRs from tuning QAM signals, and might require an amp. Maybe not, but just a consideration.

[matt91]

Originally Posted by broderp

Now, the one thing I'm not 100% sure of is if Time Warner will be sending out ALL channels in digital. They may not be anolog, but if they are digital, the HDHR should pick them up....right?

There is lots of discussion about this here and (mostly) elsewhere on the net. It's often confused with Fridays (finally!!) OTA analog shutoff.

I think that the general feeling is that analog for "basic cable" (broadcast networks + the few ubiquitous cable channels (CNN, ESPN, etc)) will be here for a number of years to come. Everything else will likely be going digital in the near future, depending on your carrier, local regulatory authority, etc.

The big question, of course, is whether or not many of the QAM channels will be encrypted or not. Who knows... The HDHR can only record the programming if it's in QAM and not encrypted.

I haven't done much "primary source" reading on this; it's just what I've gleaned reading the boards so YMMV.

Matt

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by matt91

There is lots of discussion about this here and (mostly) elsewhere on the net. It's often confused with Fridays (finally!!) OTA analog shutoff.

I think that the general feeling is that analog for "basic cable" (broadcast networks + the few ubiquitous cable channels (CNN, ESPN, etc)) will be here for a number of years to come. Everything else will likely be going digital in the near future, depending on your carrier, local regulatory authority, etc.

The big question, of course, is whether or not many of the QAM channels will be encrypted or not. Who knows... The HDHR can only record the programming if it's in QAM and not encrypted.

I haven't done much "primary source" reading on this; it's just what I've gleaned reading the boards so YMMV.

Matt

Living in southern Ohio (as I am assuming the OP does), the TWC ads on TV in the last few weeks have specifically been saying that if you have TWC, you do not have to worry about the digital switch. That's their whole advertising angle for giving people a reason to sign up. So one would assume from that statement that they (at least in this area) will be staying (mostly) analog for a while.

Of course, they could just be planning on giving everyone a cable box... ...or they could have fine print saying that "you don't need to worry for the next month or two until we switch to digital"....

[sic0048]

Keep in mind that the use of a quad core is way overkill unless you are going to be doing a lot of comskip processing. I'm not saying that you shouldn't get it, but just keep in mind that it will use more energy than a decent core2 dual chip and you probably won't even notice the difference in lower processing power.

[SWKerr]

I second what sic0048 said. A quad core for Sage is overkill. I would get a cheap 45w AMD X2 cpu and a 780G motherboard with 2GB of ram and put it into your old case and setup Sage with Windows Home Server. It will be cheap and work great.

I made this change about a year ago and it is much more stable. You can do whatever you want on your desktop and not worry about messing up your recordings.

I have 2 of the 1.5TB drives and they work great. Think they had some early issues but those have been worked out by now.

I would not buy a Vista license right now. Use the Windows 7 RC. It will run until June of 2010 and is just much better overall and is just as stable. (IE 8 still sucks but you can run Firefox or Chrome no problem.) You will eventually have to buy it but Vista just sucks comparatively.

I have a HDHR but it does not do analog. You can get a Hauppauge HVR-2250 for $122 at Newegg right now and it will do both. Two tuners is plenty since I am sure Time Warner is or will encrypt all but the basic channels. You will probably want to add a HD-PVR to get the encrypted stuff then.

I just updated my desktop with a AMD Phenom II X3 710. I am quite happy with it on a 790GX motherboard. It was cheap and over clocks easily. You can spend twice as much and get a little bit more performance but you will not notice it in any application short of video editing. Even then you still have to wait a long time to render something, it is just not quite as long. For me as long as it is done in the morning who cares.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

Living in southern Ohio (as I am assuming the OP does), the TWC ads on TV in the last few weeks have specifically been saying that if you have TWC, you do not have to worry about the digital switch. That's their whole advertising angle for giving people a reason to sign up. So one would assume from that statement that they (at least in this area) will be staying (mostly) analog for a while.

I wouldn't be so sure. Comcast has been saying the same thing, while simultaneously continuing with their move to going all-digital in various markets. I haven't heard what TWC's plans are, but I assume they're starting to make plans to go all digital. Otherwise they won't be able to keep up with Comcast/RCN/Verizon/Dish/etc when it comes to HD and Internet speed. I'm guessing for now TWC is just slowly moving the less popular channels over to digital, but at some point they'll run out.

[Tomahawk51]

Thumbs up on the 2250 card. I've been very happy with the large number of channels in QAM available through Comcast. For that reason, I use 1 card with dual QAM. If I only had a few channels, it's nice to know I could go 1 analog and 1 QAM.

Me? I'm running a Vista server and it's fine. I don't use the interface much, but I didn't want to dedicate the machine to serving completely (still use it in the office once in a while). I like the idea of WHS, but I think I'm going to wait to see how it gets improved when it's rebuilt on the Server 2008 backbone. I don't have input to say it's not good now...just being conservative. Totally get Windows 7 over Vista if you are shelling out.

[DaveW42]

For what it's worth, I have 4 of the Seagate 1.5TB drives running in a non-RAID setup (2 externals, 2 internal) and have not had any problems with them.

Personally, I would probably spend the extra $50 and get a blu-ray burner instead of just a reader (I have seen Bluray burners on NewEgg for $150 these days).

Dave