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Re: [LUG] A couple of questions

 

Cheers, Simon.

Good point about the Processors perhaps I will look that up on the FAQ for 
MCE and possibly post a question.

Front side BUS and Other I/O - I must admit to be very ignorant around this 
area (although I did read a good analogy the other day about the Front-Side 
bus being a highway between two cities, Memory and CPU). I guess I was 
rather hoping I would pick a Chip and the Bus would sort itself out.

As regards Graphics; yes MCE is very fussy with Graphics - I was planning on 
using the Fit-PC or Linutop low-powered boxes for the Media Directors but a 
MD will require a NVidia Graphics card for the UI (grrr means I have to 
build something).

As ever lots to consider!!

Regards,
Dave.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Simon Waters" <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 9:58 PM
Subject: Re: [LUG] A couple of questions


> Dave wrote:
>>
>> I am looking to spec a machine for a LINUX MCE Core. Because it is a
>> Core I am trying to make it as powerful as I can afford but this had led
>> to a couple of questions regarding LINUX which I must profess to be
>> ignorant in and was wondering whether anyone could provide the answers
>> to. Please bear in mind I will be using Kubuntu 7.10 because that is the
>> latest version LINUX MCE will run on.
>>
>> Firstly I am looking to put in 4 Gig Memory (the max for the MB) but am
>> unsure as to whether a 32 Bit LINUX can address such a large amount
>> directly and if not what happens to the rest of it; does it sit idle
>> (and wasted) or will it become a RAMDisk or similar?
>
> The answer is not a simple one, Linux is very flexible with how you can
> configure memory usage, and for some purposes a 32bit kernel can use 4GB
> of RAM effectively but.....
>
> ... If I was installing 4GB of RAM in a box I would opt for a 64 bit
> Linux based distro - which is pretty much all of the major distros just
> pick the right option.
>
> If Linux MCE can't run in 64 bit, then check with them what will work.
> Probably the issue will be drivers for unusual hardware if there are any.
>
>> Secondly I was going to get a Quad-Core Processor but again I wasn't
>> sure whether LINUX would make use of all the Processors (ditto
>> Dual-Core) or would be better saving money and using a single-core
>> Processor instead? (or at least the cheapest Dual-Core).
>
> Yes it will be able to utilise dual and quad core processors. Given all
> my servers (bar one) are sitting around at load 0, I'm not sure you'll
> need all that power. If the bulk of CPU is used by one single threaded
> process then it can't use the other CPUs, but that is an application
> issue not a server issue.
>
> Mostly video editing and video application will eat CPU and other
> resources - but unless you have hardware designed to handle it
> efficiently that is pretty much a given. Not clear to me that the Linux
> MCE does that sort of thing. Either way the folks who do Linux MCE are
> the ones to ask.
>
> You may also want to ensure that the machine is well specced in terms of
> Front Side Bus and other I/O.
>
> You'll want a video card that is well supported.
>
> A lot of the off the shelf DVD and TV devices these days are just low
> specced PCs. I seem to remember the MythTV folks had a German set top
> box which they turned into a Myth TV playback box, it was a 200MHz
> Pentium PC inside with no trimmings, but the box did MPEG decoding in
> hardware. I think the TiVo does something similar.
>
> Myth TV website notes that some graphics cards don't support XVideo on
> their TV output.... I suspect choice of the right graphics cards is as
> important as other choices, possibly more so.
>
> Indeed this is apparent on my desktop just running a normal PC desktop,
> I have a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 box with 833Mhz front side bus, hardware RAID
> cache, and I also have a fanless VIA mini-itx based box (which does
> nothing like as much in bogomips) with no fancy I/O, but the VIA
> graphics card is properly supported where as the other box just has a
> cheap onboard graphics card. The VIA box is noticeably quicker at
> certain common tasks (mostly those that involve rendering window chrome,
> or any fancy accelerated graphics). Details matter.
>
> -- 
> The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
> http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
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