My Frontend Setup

My MythTV frontend box is connected with Philips 50PFP5532D/12 plasma display using HDMI port. This was the reason why did I buy motherboard with onboard video and HDMI port. I'm still not sure what will be the final chassis and I don't like to limit my choice with full height case or limited selection of low profile video cards.

Asus M3N78-EM http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=amYCbidk7vhOQLWp

Like my previous Asus M2N-VM, M3N78-EM has everything onboard also. For a frontend I don't need anything else except HDD (SSD for booting) but with network boot I can skip this too. It has onboard gigabit ethernet which should be enough for NFS for recordings and other media and NFS or iSCSI for system itself.

Based on information from mythtv mailing lists both Nvidia VDPAU and S/PDIF via HDMI port should work. More informatio can be found at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (65W) Socket AM2 http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_13041,00.html

I specially took a little bit more expensive 65W CPU to reduce heat production. The only way to make frontend quiet is to produce less heat that should be blew away. Bundled fan is not quiet enough however and needs to be replaced.

2 x Apacer 1 GB DDR2-800 CL5 Unbuffered Memory http://emea.apacer.com/en/products/Desktop_Memory_DDR2_-_800_Unbuffered_DIMM.htm

There is no need to have more than 512 MB for MythTV frontend. At the same time memory was cheap enough to buy more. I'll try to set up some kind of RAM disk (tmpfs for instance)

Still looking around. There is no need for powerful PSU. Any 200W will be more than enough. Most PSUs with big fans are much more powerful however. Unfortunately such 400+ W PSUs are not so efficient when the load are less than 50% and this means more heat production than necessary.

Still looking around. Origen S10V is one of my favorite right now.

M2N-VM can boot really fast if everything unnecessary is disabled from BIOS. Things that are not needed for such setup are floppy and IDE/SATA controllers (might be still necessary for CD/DVD drive), all COM/LPT ports. Network boot should be enabled and all devices from boot order should be deselected.

I replaced NFS with iSCSI which looks much faster. I'll make side-by-side comparison later.

I set up Wake on LAN to boot it up remotely for installation and testing. WOL should be enabled after every boot. I put this line to /etc/init.d/halt.local:

/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g

This works fine as long as I don't use power button to turn it off.

To wake it up I use etherwake in router (ASUS WL-500g)

etherwake -i eth0.x x:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx