Andrew's diary

Sunday, 08 February 2009

All the PVR components have shipped, so tomorrow night should be getting it built. Installing an OS can wait till another night.

Saturday, 07 February 2009

Our MiniITX homebrew PVR's started hanging. I'm not sure if this is related to the Ubuntu Dapper -> Hardy -> Intrepid upgrades or an overheating problem. Nothing's getting logged in syslog, or to the console.

So I've decided to build a new one from scratch, which - according to my benchmarking - should just be powerful enough to play back content:

Abit A2-M2HD-LE motherboard

MicroATX, optical SPDIF out, HDMI out, onboard NVidia graphics.

AMD Athlon 64 LE-1640

Low power (45W) CPU, but with some grunt.

Western Digital 10DEACS 1TB

7200RPM SATA2 hard disk, lower power.

Ansec NSK2480

A case designed by one of the Silent PC Review editors to have segregated heat zones, low vibrations and quiet in-built fans; and comes with an energy efficient PSU.

Corsair 2x1GB

DDR2 800MHz RAM. Pretty random.