Server hardware? Question about motherboard.

[AJ Bertelson]

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=1

Would this run into any problems with stuttering at all?

edit here is what it would be paired with

AMD 1.2ghz-1.4ghz
256mb pc133, could go to DDR if I wanted to though
GF2 pro, would I get better quality if I went to a radeon?

[stanger89]

SiS scares me terribly.

You say server, is this just a record/server only box, or a full record/playback/server box?

You'd be much better off with something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=1
Processor would depend on what you want to do with the box.

[fidget]

I really hate to say this, but I would recommend using Intel hardware on your server. My Athlon system would not support more than 2 PVR-250 encoder cards. When I replaced it with an Intel chipset, everything worked perfectly.

[AJ Bertelson]

Originally posted by fidget
I really hate to say this, but I would recommend using Intel hardware on your server. My Athlon system would not support more than 2 PVR-250 encoder cards. When I replaced it with an Intel chipset, everything worked perfectly.

what about a BX chipset?


Also the server will only be running sage with about 3 PVR-250's and possibly a accessDTV card in the future. What sort of CPU would I need for that?

[stanger89]

BX is about 3 years outdated, if you already have one you'd probably be fine unless the 250's require a newer version of PCI (2.2 while the BX might only be 2.0). That's just speculation. I definitely wouldn't buy a BX based board, but if you have one you've got nothing to loose.

What is the server supposed to be doing? If it's headless you don't need anything special, but if you plan on using it for SageTV (watching shows) you'll want something reasonably new.

[insomniac]

I recently purchased the latest and greatest SIS chipset (which was supposed to be all that...cant remember which chipset it is right now). Anyway...It truely sucked and could not even handlea basic server function and 2 streams at the same time.

Go Intel. You wont regret it.

Im presently running all 865PE chipsets without issues. What is everyone else running?


I.

[AJ Bertelson]

Originally posted by stanger89
it's headless you don't need anything special, but if you plan on using it for SageTV (watching shows) you'll want something reasonably new.

Basically I am going to put it in the closet and run clients off of it. I am going to run sageTV on it and not sage recorder. At max rite now their will be 3 clients that would connect to the machine. It will be doing nothing else but running sageTV.

I would like to centralize my TV stuff so that I can just network into the sageTV server. This will minimize the wires coming into the house and make the wife happy since some rooms will look better

[stanger89]

If that's the case then a BX based board should be plenty if you have one, but don't buy one.

If you've got to buy something, the board I linked to with the cheapest Celeron and 256 or 512Mb of cheap Corsair RAM would work great for you.

[ErsatzTom]

To those recommending Intel boards, do you only think that it is important to get a board with Intel chipsets or do you think that the boards that Intel puts out are better than 3rd party boards using intel chipsets?

t

[stanger89]

The important part is the chipset since it seems Intel (and possibly AMD, although they haven't made a chipset in a while) is the company to impliment the PCI bus correctly. I know that sounds harsh but I lived with a VIA KT266+ based board for quite a while and did a lot of reading about PCI performance on VIA chipsets and nForce chipsets. VIA chipsets have been notorious for poor PCI: Poor IDE performance from PCI cards (RAID), problems with data corruption, problems sound popping during file transfers. nForce chipsets have had PCI write problems, max write speed of 20Mb/s, sometimes less. It's really a shame since personaly I think AMD makes better chips than Intel, especially from a price/performance standpoint.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know. Oh, I'm running an Abit BE7 845PE setup now (had a BE6 440BX too), I've never bought a real Intel board, I've never been dissapointed with Abit (3/3 boards so far). I'm 0/2 with MSI though.

[fidget]

I really prefer to have a non-Intel CPU in all of my systems, so I don't think that Intel makes a better board. My guess is that Intel does a better job of implementing the PCI specification than VIA. This may have something to do with the fact that they wrote the spec. If I was going to stay with only two tuners, I would have stayed with my VIA chipset. Going with an Intel CPU added about US$100 to the cost, and over 5W to the power dissipation, of my system.

[AJ Bertelson]

What I am basically trying to nail down is system requirements for the server based on the ammount of PVR-250's in my system.

Ex. If I run 1 PVR in my system do the system requirements change then if I had three in there? Also what about CPU usage, will it still be at 20% if I use 3 PVR's running at once?

[stanger89]

Recording takes ~0% CPU so just about anything should work as a server as long as you're not watching stuff on the server.

[AJ Bertelson]

Originally posted by stanger89
Recording takes ~0% CPU so just about anything should work as a server as long as you're not watching stuff on the server.

well I like to do worst case scenarios so here we go.

3 people would be watching the PVR's with clients and 1 person would be watching the accessDTV card.

What should the system specs be?

[fidget]

Originally posted by AJ Bertelson
well I like to do worst case scenarios so here we go.

3 people would be watching the PVR's with clients and 1 person would be watching the accessDTV card.

What should the system specs be?

Your system will just be transferring data between the IDE and network interfaces. If you have DMA enabled on your hard drives (which I would expect) then you are only spending time transferring data and not doing any "real" work. I would be most concerned about the network utilization.

I don't know what kind of load to expect from the accessDTV card, so the following only addressed using PVR-250 style cards.

I would not expect to see more than 1-2% CPU usage per each PVR recording source. This is used to transfer the MPEG data from the card to the hard drive.

If you have three people watching recorded programming (assuming DVD standard quality at 3.25 GB/hr), you will be using about 24 Mbps of bandwidth (which is about 30-40% of the expected available bandwidth of a 100baseT network)

[shodge]

Interesting.

More wild stories. I have put together no less than 5 successful XP professional systems with the motherboard (K7S5A) cited at the top (actually the previous non-PRO version). It is true that the AMD chips require more power and you NEED a 400W PS specifically for that motherboard. There are several ECS support sites with much information on these systems.

I will state that I have no experience with more than 1 PVR-250 in a system. However, my origianl system which tested with Sage 6 months ago, was fitted with a PCI raid controller, a PCI sound card, a PCI iee1394 interface card and of course a PVR-250 and a ATI 8500 video card. With XP Professional and 256MB ram this system ran falwlessly for over 1 month. At that point I created a copy system with only the on board sound, the PVR-250 and a 5200 video card with s-video out. I droped the raid controller and went with onboard IDE controller. I used 64K sector NTFS on 2, 120GB drives and this second system is in full time use. It has ran 24/7 for 5 months [used heavily between 5PM and 10PM each day] and never crashes. NEVER. I have done much tweaking on the system & added various hardware items like wireless keyboard & mouse. Updating Sage when new versions come out, and change over from XMLTV to Sage Guide. So really the max time between reboots from my tweaking is around 1 month.

And yes, I have 2 network Sage clients which use the above Sage Server. Additionally, I'm working on deploying a MVP client [sharing the Sage Video Databases] in my bedroom. This is working great in my test area, I just don't have the time to run the cable to the beadroom. So networking is not an issue either. BTW I have had both clients running at the same time with no ill effects (2GB/hr quallity).

CPU sizes... The original test box has / had a XP 2200+, the current system has a duron 1.2.

Future: I'm looking toward upgrading the CPU to a XP 2600+ ($85) and installing Server 2003. Then I can move my current web based X-10 server along with the family WEB server over to this machine. This will allow the multi-media for the house (mp3's and digial photos) to be server from the same place as the Video system. Sage will then also directly have access to that data without sharing it accross eithernet - an excellent bed for Sage 2...

This is just my experience, as always YMMV....

-Stan

[stanger89]

The only quantifiable experience I have is that my RAID array is at least 10x faster in my 845 board than it was in the KT266 board. I never really thought my AMD systems were unstable, but they did have more quirks.

AJ,

I see you have an ADTV listed, how are you planning on setting that up? If you're using the ADTVs decoder then you'd be fine with what I recommended above. However if you are planning on playing/watching HDTV (on the server) in software you'll want some pretty hefty HW to guarantee good results. Here are 2 setups.

No viewing or full HW decoding:
845PE board (Abit BH7)
1.7GHz Celeron
512Mb Corsair PC2700

Viewing HDTV, SW decoding
865PE board (Abit AI7)
2.8GHz+ P4 800Mhz w/ HT (The new Prescott based chips will be out next month)
2x256Mb Corsair XMS PC3200

FWIW, here's my setup:
2.4GHz P4 533
Abit BE7 845PE
512Mb Corsair XMS PC2700 Low Latency
Sapphire Radeon 9500 64Mb
M-Audio Revolution
WinTV PVR 250
3ware Escalade 6400 3x40Gb Maxtor 7200's RAID 0
200Gb Western Digital Speical Edition 8Mb
Pioneer DVR-A06
All on a 275W Fortron PS with single 120mm fan (Quiet)

I can play HD just fine with Sasem's OnAir HD Editor, however I get studder in SageTV. I can play the 720p WMV-HD Coral Reef Adventure perfect with a registry tweak, but the 1080p version is a nogo.

[AJ Bertelson]

I didn't notice this till now but I have located a BX system but it only has a 300 in it(found some cheap slot 1's on ebay). Anyways, if I do what I want to do, have the sagetv server box just sit in a corner how much memory do I need if I run three PVR's off of it?