I currently own a PVR-350 that I haven't done anything with yet due to lack of time. I want a dedicated box for it though and came across this one that looked interesting.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php? ... ure=SOLTEK

I was wondering what people's opinions are on this one and getting it running with my PVR-350 and KnoppMyth. I didn't want to buy it and then come in here asking for help and be told that I should have stayed away from it. For the money though (price in that link is in Canadian dollars), it seems hard to beat! It's a case, PSU, fanless CPU - all I'd have to add is some RAM and a harddrive and I'd be good to go.

Let me know what you think.

Having gone the SFF route myself I'll say that they're very cute, but also fairly limited. At the moment I'm wishing I'd gone with something like the Chaintech 7NIF2 motherboard and a somewhat bigger case like the Antec Aria or the Cooler Master ATC-620C-BX1 to get more PCI slots.

On SFF boxes, having built ones based on both the Biostar IDEQ 200T and the Shuttle SN41G2, I'll tell you that the Biostar box went together far easier and with much less hassle. The cleaner layout and prerouted cables realy do make a difference. The only thing I don't like about the Biostar is the silly sliding door, and on that count YMMV. The Shuttle does have NVidia MX4 video with TV-Out built into the Mobo, but that's a moderate gain.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm not too worried about getting extra PCI slots - this is only going to be a Myth box.

My main question is about ease of Linux installation. I don't want to have to worry about fiddling too much with it. Does anyone know if the current kernel in KnoppMyth has support for that machine?

A 1 gigahertz C3... Soltek maybe the maker, but this looks like a Via Epia. While it should work w/ KnoppMytj, you most likely will have to fiddle. I'd say avoid it.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

This is exactly the mistake I made and am trying to warn you against. I started out with an 80Gb HD with the plan to archive stuff to DVD (easier said than done) and adding the 2nd 200Gb drive was not easy. I figured that one PCI slot to put a PVR250 in was plenty, but now I'd really love to have a second PVR250 or better still a PVR350 and don't have a slot for it. The onboard sound is OK, but upgrading to a high quality sound card would need yet another PCI slot I don't have.

Tom's second principle of engineering is now officially - "don't design/plan/code yourself into a corner". The first, whose importance can not be overstated, is - "it annoyed me so I fixed it". I'm utterly convinced that this is the true basis of all engineering.