After what seems like months (it's only been weeks) of fighting
a losing battle with HD playback on my Shuttle 2.4GHz P4 + PCI
FX5200 setup, I gave up and got an Asus M2NPV-VM, 1GB of RAM
and an X2 BE-2400 CPU from newegg.

I've got it running the R5F27 livecd frontend and it's playing
back HD beautifully using the Xorg nv driver and the standard
SW MPEG2 decoder (currently using 1280x1024 output via the VGA
connector). 1080i with Bob deinterlacing plays with about 50%
CPU idle. 720p plays with about 30-40% CPU idle, and the CPU
heatsink is cool to the touch. My faith in KnoppMyth and
MythTV is restored, and I'm glad that the CPU vendors finally
realized that not everybody wants CPUs that give off enough
heat to cook breakfast while sounding like a small jet engine
spooling up for takeoff.

Next on the todo list is to measure the motherboard power
consumption during HD playback (and maybe something running to
simulate commflagging) to verify that a Pico PSU from minibox
will be sufficient. Since the BE-2400 max design power is 45W,
I'm hoping that an 80W power supply will be sufficient for the
motherboard and a slimline DVD drive.

Then I need to find a nice small case for the motherboard and
slimline DVD drive. It doesn't need room for a hard drive or a
power-supply, since those are both going to be external. It
would be nice to have someplace on the back to mount a couple
PCI brackets for the extra connectors (firewire, eSATA, audio,
etc.).

With the external power brick and an eSata drive stashed out of
sight (and a little bit more out-of-earshot) behind the tv
stand, it should be a nice quiet, unobtrusive little box.
Though if I have to resort to a homebrew case, it might end up
a bit industrial looking. It would be nice to get rid of the
fan on the CPU heatsink, but it seems to run pretty quietly, so
maybe it'll be OK.

_________________
Grant

Howdy,

I look forward to your findings of how much power consumption your box is using. I am running a similar setup for my frontend (without the DVD) but am still using a standard PSU atm and wish to make the change to a Pico or Morex silent one. Gotta love 45w.

Regards,
Kirk.

_________________
MBE/FE ~ R5F27 ~ Asus A8N-VM-CSM ~ AMD64 3500+ ~ 1GB RAM ~ 1.5TB Storage ~ Nova-T-500 ~ SH-S183A DVDRW ~ LC20M Case ~ iMON-Pad Remote
FE ~ Diskless ~ Asus M2NPV-VM ~ AMD X2 BE-2350 (45w) ~ 1GB RAM ~ TT Lanbox Lite ~ iMON-Pad Remote

Hopefully I can get around to it this week. I'm a bit nervous
since neither of my DVMs will go past 10A, and that may not be
quite enough under heavy load. I'm going to ask around to see
if I can borrow a clamp on current probe before I try anything
else (I'm not spending $400 on one for this little experiment).
If I can't find a current probe, I may build and calibrated a shunt
element rather than running all the current through a DVM.

_________________
Grant

I was checking out those 45w processors last week. I can't wait to see the results of your test. I use one of those DC-DC adapters on my epia and love how quiet they keep the frontend systems. I found that laptop hard drives work well in frontends and keep power consumption down also.

_________________
Backend R5E50
P4 1.3 - 384MB, 250GB HD, HD5000AV, PVR150 non MCE
Frontend R5E50
EPIA M1000 - 512MB, 40GB HD, Streamzap
KnoppMyth Folding Team Stats

I'm getting pretty excited about the price of the M2NPV-VM these days, it's almost a good enough price to convince the wife to let me get one. What RAM did you end up going with? I know they are picky with the memory you use.

Don't wait too long: it's already discontinued (no longer shown
as a current product on the Asus web site). The price has gone
up $5 on newegg in the past few weeks. The first time I looked
at them they were $90, and when I bought one they had gone up
to $95.

Based on a recommendation in another thread, I got a 1GB GSkill
kit (2X512MB). I ran memtest86 on it for a few hours when I
first plugged it together and so far it's good.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231102

_________________
Grant

I ordered most of my components through newegg, but as grante said, the newegg price shot up quite a bit in a short period of time. I ended up getting a good deal on that and my PVR-500 from www.mwave.com. Both were a lot cheaper than newegg, but some of their policies are a little bit wacky. They won't ship outside your billing address unless you call your credit card company and add an alternate shipping address. I had to call their customer support a couple times because I screwed my billing info up and they seemed alright.

Right now their prices is $84 for the motherboard. They are out of stock on their PVR-500s.

I'm pretty optimistic since the in-system testing that was done
at silentpcreview looks like a CPU with similar power
dissipation and an addition of a 3.5" HD and a CD-ROM drive:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article601-page1.html

That motherboard and drive combination draws 40W at idle and
72W running a CPU burn program, so an 80W brick _ought_ to be
able to handle it. It would be nice to derate the brick more,
but the 110W brick sold by mini-box has lound fan. I could
break out some extra cash and use something like this instead of
the mini-box 80W brick:

98W plastic brick

http://www.slpower.com/Upload/Technical ... _PW132.pdf
http://www.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch ... 71-2436-ND

150W metal mesh encl

http://www.netsuite.com/core/media/medi ... 3&_xt=.pdf
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSea ... 37-1307-ND

_________________
Grant

Will you need an adapter to convert the DC-DC adapter to 24 pin? I didn't see any of the units that had 24 pins. It looks like some of the larger psu units have a header for the 4 pin lead also.

_________________
Backend R5E50
P4 1.3 - 384MB, 250GB HD, HD5000AV, PVR150 non MCE
Frontend R5E50
EPIA M1000 - 512MB, 40GB HD, Streamzap
KnoppMyth Folding Team Stats

Yes. I've got one now that I'm using for my initial testing,
but it's going to get butchered to do current measurements
later this week. I read somewhere (probably at
silentpcreviews.com) that it comes with various adapters
including a 20->24 pin ATX adapter.

There's a header that can be use to power hard/optical/floppy
drives as well as the ATX 4-pin connector. If you follow the
link to silentpcreviews, There are pictures of the various
adapter cables that come with it.

_________________
Grant

I gave up looking for a COTS case, and ordered a motherboard
tray around which I'll have to build a small case:

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/ ... s_id=20966

Wish I had access to a sheet metal brake and shear.

_________________
Grant

Here are the results:


The first column of current/power numbers is sitting idle with
the frontend running displaying a menu. The second column is
playing back an ATSC SD recording with about 80% idle CPU. The
third column is playing back an HD recording at roughly 50%
idle CPU (there wasn't much difference between 720p and 1080i).
The last column is playing back an HD recording with a couple
instances of bzip2 running to keep CPU usage at 100%.

All playback was done with the standard MPEG2 decoder -- no
xvmc. Enabling xvmc should noticeably lower the power
consumption during playback.

My guess is that the top line (12V 4-pin) is the CPU, and the
5V rail runs the memory and chipset. It looks like the 12V on
the 24-pin connector isn't used for anything except the CPU fan.

I don't know how much power to allocate to a slimline DVD
drive. The shit-for-brains web site authors for the
manufacturers just have bullet items like "low power" and the
specs never list any numbers. To me "low power" is 100uA at
1.8V. "Low power" means you can run it off a pair of alkaline
AA cells for a year or two. Nothing in a PC is "low power"
except the CMOS RAM and RTC.

I saw one press release from Pioneer that claimed an "average"
power consumption of 3W, so I'm going to take a WAG and say
5-10W.

The mini-box picoPSU-120 specs are 12V:7A 5V:6A 3.3V:6A, so it
should work nicely if a slim dvd drive doesn't draw too much
from the 5V rail. If I allocate 5-10W for the DVD drive, I'm
up to 70-75W total, so I think I'll go with the 98W brick from
Digikey rather than the 80W brick from mini-box. Pulling 75W
from a brick rated at 80W isn't leaving much margin.

Unfortunately the picoPSU-120 is out of stock.

_________________
Grant

Thanks for following up with this info. This will certainly help guide my power supply purchase.

_________________
MBE/FE ~ R5F27 ~ Asus A8N-VM-CSM ~ AMD64 3500+ ~ 1GB RAM ~ 1.5TB Storage ~ Nova-T-500 ~ SH-S183A DVDRW ~ LC20M Case ~ iMON-Pad Remote
FE ~ Diskless ~ Asus M2NPV-VM ~ AMD X2 BE-2350 (45w) ~ 1GB RAM ~ TT Lanbox Lite ~ iMON-Pad Remote

Apparently they send that adapter to reviewers but not to real
customers. I just got my Pico120 today and it didn't come with
any of the adapters shown in the review.

Except they don't really come with it. The DC-DC converter
comes with two 4-pin Molex drive connectors and a 4-pin floppy
connector. None of the adapters shown in the review are really
included with the product. Which would have been OK had I
known that: I could have included them on my last newegg order
for next-to-nothing. Now I've got to buy retail versions
locally for about 10X the price. :/

_________________
Grant

It turns out I don't really need that adapter after all.
the ATX 24-pin connector is a superset of the 20-pin connector
and they're mechanically compatible: you can plug a 20-pin
connector onto a 24-pin motherboard. The extra 4 pins are
there to provide additional 24V and 3.3V capacity. The
motherboard doesn't draw significant current at those voltages,
so the 24V and 3.3V capacity provided by the 20-pin connector
is more than enough.

I will need something to plug into that extra 4-pin "P4"
connector, but I'm going to wire that directly to the feed from
the brick and not go through the DC-DC converter board for the
high-current 24V supply.

_________________
Grant