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. Selection between DVI and HDMI port can be done with jumpers. 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 Socket AM2 M2N-VM HDMI

Asus M2N-VM has everything onboard and for frontend I don't need anything else except HDD 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.

Bad news is that audio through HDMI is still not supported but Nvidia claimed that this is now implemented and it is expected to ship in the release 177 driver when available [1] .

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (65W) Socket AM2

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

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.