New SageTV server build ideas?

[najames]

Thanks Jayson.

I took a look at the board and CPU at Newegg. They are almost the same price as a similar complete (although minimal) HP server on Newegg. I'd really like to spend less on the board/CPU/RAM, need some new larger "green" drives too. An Intel BOXDQ57TM would cost $120, i5 650 is $180 ($139 at Microcenter, grrrrrr), and 4GB (8?) $90 RAM, 4 1.5-2TB drives. AMD would be about $165 for a 890FX board, $60-100 for a CPU "IF" it's IOMMU virtualization worked.

On SilentPCreview someone was considering an Intel board vs another manufacturer, knowing there wouldn't be much voltage control on the Intel board. It was as I suspected, there is not much to gain in undervolting the i5 CPU at idle speeds.

I too picked up the Gigabyte H55. Undervolting for me did nothing at idle power but did cut some off under load. If I were buying again, I'd probably just go for the Intel and save the hassle while getting lower power....Here's what I measured when I first got it with a barebones setup. MB/CPU, PicoPSU 150 (200W brick), and a 2.5" laptop drive...

Code:
Voltage Idle Load
------- ---- ----
Stock 30 71
-0.15 30 60
-0.1875 30 58

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...ic.php?t=59784

Jim

[najames]

Eye Carumba!!

I dowloaded EvilPenguin's EvilBrew of MediaShrink tonight.

Then I ran a half hour Rick Steve's Europe from PBS show through it for a test. There are no regular "commercials" in the SD recording. It took a while and seeing all 4 cores basically PEGGED during Handbrake made me a little nervous. CPUZ showed the undervolted Q6600 was running mostly at 1.104V during the processing in CPUZ, but sometimes blipped up to ~1.12V.

Once I saw how MediaShrink worked (converted the mpeg file to a ~30% smaller MKV), I turned it loose on a wifey 4 hour Today Show. It is chugging through it ok with cores 0&1 at 55C and 2&3 at 50C, not bad for the MiniNinja cooler. The original file size for Today was almost 20GB and it has been processing for 60+ minutes now.

This experience is making me reevaluate my new server plans. Dual core and virtual stuff might be out too unless I do like Stanger discussed, using my i7 920 to process it off a shared drive. I bought the 920 parts to build a test server for work to prove to ITS our old Solaris box was a POS. I processed the big sequential files in ~2.5 hours using 100MB stripes on 4 black WD drives in RAID0 for scratch space and similar stripes on another 2 WD blue 640s for sorting data. This compared to 7+ hours on the 4 CPU (1.28GHz single cores) production Solaris box connected to their SAN. I'd bet this same type of setup with a couple SSDs in RAID0 for "work space" would be nice for processing these video files.

If I can get a bunch of stuff processed/compressed off the WHS server to get more free space, I'll have more time to decided what to do next, hopefully not a wrong decision. I researched hard drives today, was thinking of choosing Samsung Eco drives or Hitachis, and found a new version of Samsung's Eco drive is on the way now for sale in Sept.

Hitachi thread
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1482622

Samsung Ecogreen F4
http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/03/s...-2tb-for-less/

This is another humbling experience showing me how little I really know about SageTV.