I have built my first KM system with a borrowed desktop to prove that I could do it before spending on the final system. That being said, I would like to use a low power system because I would like to leverage an existing 20V 4.5A Laptop Power supply with a DC DC converter.
In addition, I would like to avoid sources of noise (CPU and PS fans). I am looking at the VIA processors because these seem to fit the power \ fanless requirements. I am open to other MOBO \ CPU that meet the requirement (< 12W & fanless).
Among the Via CPUs, I must choose from the list here
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/:
* C7 - latest offering
* Eden - very low power (7.5W)
* C3
I found some good info here to ballpark pricing for VIA MOBO\CPU prices:
http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/m ... refusion/1
My questions are to those who are using VIA systems:
* do you have a CPU \ MOBO recommendation?
* Should I make the unichrome video chipset (or other MPG2 hardware) a requirement?
* Is there a table (I could not find one) that lists low power (<15W) Processors (AMD, Intel)?
I am not sure what speed (Mhz) I need to run a frontend \ backend system. I would like to stay under 12 watts with the MOBO, so I can run other components (DVD, HDD, etc) with balance of the 90W power supply.
I appreciate any experience and hints.
UPDATE
=======
I found this snippet from
http://www.linuxis.us/linux/media/howto ... /cpus.html
Quote:
The reason is that HDTV takes around 2.8Ghz to de-interlace and make 1080i HDTV look good (Unless you use a video card that supports XvMC Hardware MPEG-2 decoding which offloads about 1ghz of CPU usage to the video card -- which leaves you needing a 1.8Ghz CPU or so, which is more than C3's have). If you never plan on doing HDTV with this specific HTPC, C3 can be a great choice. Some of the coolest (Temperature and looks), smallest, and quietest HTPC's are ones running C3 processors. They work very well when combined with hardware encoder and decoder cards like the PVR-X50 cards. These cards will off load the CPU from displaying and encoding audio and video. A 1.0 Ghz C3 is more than enough for DVD, TV, and Music when combined with these cards. The Telly, Replay, and over half of the set top and commercial available HTPC's use Via C3's in them. Many guru HTPC builders use C3's and in another year we should see C3's running HDTV (Which some of the newer C3 boards support, but no driver works for this yet, see the links page for this project link).
I am not sure why the article discuss C3's and not C7's. It would seem that VIA is a dead end with regard to becoming an HD player. I hope someone out there can proves this wrong as it would be nice to have 9W system vs a 90 watt CPU.
_________________
R7.3: 0.22.20091023-1, Hauppauge PVR-500 (Philips FQ1236A MK4),
Gigabyte Gigabyte EG45M-UD2H, E5200 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GEFORCE 256MB
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