Craig Sanders wrote: ... > the main things i'm not sure about are: > > - what CPU to get? > > i'm tempted by an athlon 64, but then i'd have to start mirroring > the a64 distribution of debian as well as the i386, and i'm > generally not keen to pay a price premium to be a guinea-pig for new > hardware....a64 and a64 motherboard designs probably won't be mature > for another year or so. > > other alternatives P4 or and Athlon, with the athlon being slightly > cheaper. VDR works happily with a 150MHz CPU if you have a full-featured card or with under 1 GHz if you don't. At least here in Germany the best price per GHz according to http://www.geizhals.net/deutschland/?cat=cpuk7sa&sort=r is an AMD Duron 1800Mhz, which should be more than adequate. The only function you can always speed up with a faster CPU is re/encoding for DVD burning, but unless you do that several times a day, I would not spend extra money for a few minutes less wait time. > - what video card to get? > > i have a matrox G450 in my desktop - is that adequate? i'm thinking > of upgrading my desktop video card anyway, which will leave the matrox > spare. actually, i'm sure it's adequate - the real question is, "is > it a *good* card for a dedicated VDR box?" Matrox cards are know to produce the best signal quality. So, get an Nvidia card with DVI output and a flat panel for your desktop (then signal quality will not matter) and use the Matrox for your VDR system. Carsten.
