I'm about to purchase a new motherboard, cpu and case to use with LinuxMCE and was hoping for confirmation that this hardware will allow me to get the most out of the software.
Motherboard: MSI K9AGM2-FIH 690G Socket AM2 1000MHz DDR2-800 M-ATX
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 4600+ Socket AM2 (65W)
Case: Antec NSK2480
I have the Hauppauge PVR-150 which I will bring over to the new box as well as 2 gigs RAM and 2 SATA HDDs (320 & 500gb).
My main use of the box will be as a media center with PVR and music use as well as a NAS.
Any thoughts/suggestions?
Also, the AMD 690G chipset that the MB uses can do separate VGA and HDMI out. I plan on sending the VGA signal to an old TV and the HDMI to my computer monitor via a 30 foot HDMI to DVI cable. Will the software allow me to have two separate displays (rather than showing the same thing on each display)?
Thanks in advance,
E
Let me guess, that mainboard has an SB600 sata controller and an X1250 graphics chip. Those currently have more then their fair share of problems. I'm expecting the upcoming 0710 release to solve at least some of the issues, but I think you'd probably want to pick something else. Untill then it's only usable with IDE drives and you can probably forget about running MythTV.
And I wouldn't get my hopes up to high for that dual screen setup if I were you, that's not how the system was intended so it's likely going to be a bitch to set it up if even possible at all.
You're right on both counts - very disappointing. Is this specifically a LinuxMCE 'bug' or will I have the same problem by going the Ubuntu/MythTV route separately?
Thanks!
E
The problem is specificly MythTV related, other then that LMCE runs fine (as does Kaffeine when playing TV for instance). In all honesty I haven't tried the very latest version of the ATI drivers yet, but I doubt the issue has been solved already.
Thanks for the quick reply.
Any suggestions on an alternative Intel setup - CPU and MB (with HDMI) at a reasonable price point?
Thanks again,
E
All the motherboards I know about are listed in the wiki: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Category:Hardware, see the Mainboards subcategory.
Thanks for the link.
Found this great board:
GIGABYTE GA-73UM-S2H LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7150 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard (GeForce 7150/nForce 630i chipsets) which I'll pair with an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2140 (1.6GHz 65W 1MB L2).
Anyone know if this will work well with LinuxMCE?
Thanks again,
E
Quote from: eoren1 on November 10, 2007, 02:28:04 PM
Thanks for the quick reply.
Any suggestions on an alternative Intel setup - CPU and MB (with HDMI) at a reasonable price point?
Thanks again,
E
Hi,
Well MSI MS-7329 is not an Intel MB but we are testing it now and it looks excellent with onboard 6150 graphics and HDMI output;
http://217.110.237.67/Manuals/7329-engl%20v1.0%20-%20MS-7329%20(G52-73291X1).pdf
Zaerc... I am running straight over to the Wiki now to update the hardware pages ;-)
eoren1: The geforce 6,7 & 8 series all seem to work well, although some of the newer ones may require a manual update of the display drivers after installing LMCE (at the moment, but likely to change when the new version is released) I don't recall anyone reporting that they were unable to get them to work properly. But I can't give you any guarantees as I haven't tried that specific board myself.
Quote from: totallymaxed on November 10, 2007, 05:18:02 PM
Zaerc... I am running straight over to the Wiki now to update the hardware pages ;-)
Awesome, the more the merrier! :) Thanks on behalf of all the people looking for a good mainboard, much appreciated.
And on a sidenote: I'm really looking forward to VDR support, since I'm stuck with that forementioned X1250 chipset myself.
Quote from: Zaerc on November 10, 2007, 07:11:11 PM
eoren1: The geforce 6,7 & 8 series all seem to work well, although some of the newer ones may require a manual update of the display drivers after installing LMCE (at the moment, but likely to change when the new version is released) I don't recall anyone reporting that they were unable to get them to work properly. But I can't give you any guarantees as I haven't tried that specific board myself.
Quote from: totallymaxed on November 10, 2007, 05:18:02 PM
Zaerc... I am running straight over to the Wiki now to update the hardware pages ;-)
Awesome, the more the merrier! :) Thanks on behalf of all the people looking for a good mainboard, much appreciated.
And on a sidenote: I'm really looking forward to VDR support, since I'm stuck with that forementioned X1250 chipset myself.
Well we're working hard on vdr integration and we hope that it will make it into the lmce-0710 release ;-)
By the way I may need some assistance with updating the Wiki... I tried updating the hardware page but when I click on 'Edit' the page I get has an edit field with just a include block in it. I was expecting to get editable markup like i would for a detail link. I know this is not place for Wiki support but some tips from the 'master' would be welcome ;-)
Totallymaxed - that MB doesn't seem to have SP-DIF out, how do you get digital audio whilst HDMI doesn't work for LMCE yet? Have you managed to get that working somehow?
I'm not that skilled in editing the wiki either, I just look at other edit pages and try things as I go along, the "Show preview" button usually comes in handy. But I guess some directions on adding new stuff is overdue a bit as it's not so intuitive, and I never realized this is one of the things keeping people from adding stuff. :P If this is useful I'll put it in the wiki as well.
To add a new page you can just make up a new url, like this: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Name of the page you want to add (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Name%20of%20the%20page%20you%20want%20to%20add) (the wiki will replace spaces with underscores automaticly) and edit it.
For hardware I think the best convention is: "Manufacturer_Model-Type-Whatever", in your case that would be: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/MSI_MS-7329. To categorize the page so that it's easy to find, you can put this at the top of the page:
[[Category: Hardware]]
[[Category: Mainboards]]
And below that you can put anything you feel is relevant. Here are a few things I figured out so far:
==This is how you can do a section header==
===Which can be nested by adding more equal signs===
*This is an unordered (bullit) list.
**These can also be nested
#This is an ordered (numbered) list
##I think these can be nested as well
:This will be indented
::Indented more
Lines starting with a space will be "preformatted", and placed in one of those typical dotted boxes.
''Italic text''
'''bold text'''
'''''italic and bold'''''
Urls are automaticly recognized, but there are more possibilities. For example:
http://some.domain/page.html shows the URL 'as is'
[http://some.domain/page.html] shows up as an increasing number
[http://some.domain/page.html alternative text] shows up as "alternative text"
[[other wiki page]] link to other_wiki_page, shows as "other wiki page"
[[other wiki page|alternative text]] link to other_wiki_page, shows as "alternative text"
<nowiki>this will stop the wiki from applying formatting, useful if you don't want url's turned into links for instance</nowiki>
Alternatively you can also use the standard HTML tags. I hope I got all that right and that it's enough to get you started. The headings will be put into a table of contents at the top, but only when the page gets long enough I think.
The Nvidia 7050 chipset doesn't work with the driver built into LMCE. And the new driver published by Nvidia is very crashprone. There is a newer beta driver but its beta and may not be very stable. The MSI board TotallyMaxxed suggested is pretty special and not available here in the US, however it should work pretty well. (BTW the link seems either broken or on a very slow server). I would stick with a 6150 chipset because they work. I couldn't find a speed or feature difference between them except HDMI that would matter. Asus M2NPV-VM.
Quote from: colinjones on November 11, 2007, 05:20:46 AM
Totallymaxed - that MB doesn't seem to have SP-DIF out, how do you get digital audio whilst HDMI doesn't work for LMCE yet? Have you managed to get that working somehow?
Yes it does it has 2 x SP-DIF headers... looking at them now ;-)
HDMI works fine under LMCE by the way... its now our standard interconnect for screens.
Quote from: 1audio on November 11, 2007, 07:37:42 AM
The Nvidia 7050 chipset doesn't work with the driver built into LMCE. And the new driver published by Nvidia is very crashprone. There is a newer beta driver but its beta and may not be very stable. The MSI board TotallyMaxxed suggested is pretty special and not available here in the US, however it should work pretty well. (BTW the link seems either broken or on a very slow server). I would stick with a 6150 chipset because they work. I couldn't find a speed or feature difference between them except HDMI that would matter. Asus M2NPV-VM.
The MS-7329 board is not 7050 based it uses the nVidia C51PVG onboard graphics chip which is a 6150 class part and is supported out of the 'box' by lmce-0704 (we are running the standard lmce-0704 drivers as they work perfectly on this chip). This board is an excellent board and we would rate as certainly one of the best we have tested under lmce.
The link is not broken by the way... maybe its just slow from where you are located.
Quote from: Zaerc on November 11, 2007, 05:23:05 AM
I'm not that skilled in editing the wiki either, I just look at other edit pages and try things as I go along, the "Show preview" button usually comes in handy. But I guess some directions on adding new stuff is overdue a bit as it's not so intuitive, and I never realized this is one of the things keeping people from adding stuff. :P If this is useful I'll put it in the wiki as well.
To add a new page you can just make up a new url, like this: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Name of the page you want to add (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Name%20of%20the%20page%20you%20want%20to%20add) (the wiki will replace spaces with underscores automaticly) and edit it.
For hardware I think the best convention is: "Manufacturer_Model-Type-Whatever", in your case that would be: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/MSI_MS-7329. To categorize the page so that it's easy to find, you can put this at the top of the page:
[[Category: Hardware]]
[[Category: Mainboards]]
And below that you can put anything you feel is relevant. Here are a few things I figured out so far:
==This is how you can do a section header==
===Which can be nested by adding more equal signs===
*This is an unordered (bullit) list.
**These can also be nested
#This is an ordered (numbered) list
##I think these can be nested as well
:This will be indented
::Indented more
Lines starting with a space will be "preformatted", and placed in one of those typical dotted boxes.
''Italic text''
'''bold text'''
'''''italic and bold'''''
Urls are automaticly recognized, but there are more possibilities. For example:
http://some.domain/page.html shows the URL 'as is'
[http://some.domain/page.html] shows up as an increasing number
[http://some.domain/page.html alternative text] shows up as "alternative text"
[[other wiki page]] link to other_wiki_page, shows as "other wiki page"
[[other wiki page|alternative text]] link to other_wiki_page, shows as "alternative text"
<nowiki>this will stop the wiki from applying formatting, useful if you don't want url's turned into links for instance</nowiki>
Alternatively you can also use the standard HTML tags. I hope I got all that right and that it's enough to get you started. The headings will be put into a table of contents at the top, but only when the page gets long enough I think.
Hey thanks Zaerc... just what I needed ;-)
Totallymaxed - sorry, yeah saw that after I posted, haven't read it closely, but there was a diagram of a panel of outputs that didn't include the SP opt, but further down it talks about them (and even SP in [optional]) ... not sure why. But glad to hear that it has it anyway!
On the HDMI - I know that the video works fine, but I have read on the forums that the audio through HDMI doesn't - and that post also mentioned Realtek and that the Linux driver probably needs this implemented. Are you saying that you can get digital audio out of the HDMI interface out of the box with LMCE? Pushing my luck here.... but .... what about the CEC control interface?
Col
Quote from: colinjones on November 11, 2007, 12:25:28 PM
Totallymaxed - sorry, yeah saw that after I posted, haven't read it closely, but there was a diagram of a panel of outputs that didn't include the SP opt, but further down it talks about them (and even SP in [optional]) ... not sure why. But glad to hear that it has it anyway!
On the HDMI - I know that the video works fine, but I have read on the forums that the audio through HDMI doesn't - and that post also mentioned Realtek and that the Linux driver probably needs this implemented. Are you saying that you can get digital audio out of the HDMI interface out of the box with LMCE? Pushing my luck here.... but .... what about the CEC control interface?
Col
Audio over the HDMI does seem to work... but also sometimes it does not :-(
We're not sure exactly why that is yet. Hopefully we'll have some more info on this next week and I'll post an update as soon as I have any news. Clearly audio over HDMI is intended to work and i would not hold off buying an HDMI enabled board.
As to CEC... we have not tested that. but I am fairly certain that even if the physical HDMI interface is capabile of it (I think it is) then lmce has no support for it currently... again I'll post some feedback on that asap next week ;-)
I got the file finally, it was very slow from here. Maybe we should push MSI to make that board available. They have an office close to me. Is the combo package reasonably priced? Maybe we can get Fiire to offer it preconfigured.
Quote from: totallymaxed on November 11, 2007, 11:20:08 AM
Hey thanks Zaerc... just what I needed ;-)
You're more then welcome, and thank you for adding it, not to mention all your other effort.
I have added it to the wiki editing help, and I saw that Matthew has been so kind to expand it a bit so thank you as well.
Totallymaxed-
Did you get the analog Audio output running in 7.1 mode on the Media Live box? And what is on the VFD?
Quote from: 1audio on November 19, 2007, 07:20:43 AM
Totallymaxed-
Did you get the analog Audio output running in 7.1 mode on the Media Live box? And what is on the VFD?
Hi there,
I'll check the 7.1 analog audio... I'm pretty sure we have the SP-DIF working, and analog stereo. The VFD is something we're working on. Interestingly there is support for the VFD in 0704 and I know that the front panel transport control buttons do work perfectly. So far we have not got anything onto the display. I'll find out where we are at on that though and post an update later.
Andrew
Totallymaxed -
Any update on this MSI board? How did you go with audio and CEC? What are your thoughts on the 7050PV from NVidia - looking at the specs they seem to be saying that this is the minimum for HD/1080p for Blu ray and HDDVD with HCPI... does that sound right?
As a result I was looking at the MSI K9NGM3(or 2 or 4!) which has 7050PV and nForce 630a, which an HDMI connector. Do you think that is necessary/beneficial or just stick with the 7329? Do you think that it is a problem that the K9NGM3 is only AM2 not AM2+ and so only has HyperTranport2.0 (1G rather than 2.6G that AM2+ supports)?
Really keen to get the best HDMI board first time without spending a lot of money!
CEC support won't be in PC's for some time. And existing boards with HDMI don't have the hardware. Like all HDMI features the CEC implementation is broken in the first release and badly implemented by most vendors. It probably won't work well enough to be useable across vendors before HDMI 1.4.
I have heard that the Nvidia linux drivers don't support sound on HDMI yet. If the board is hard wired to work that won't matter but if not it may be a while.
1audio - understood, at the same time, Andrew said he was looking into some of these aspects a couple of weeks ago... just wondered if he had made any progress.... and more importantly and more generally his views on the boards mentioned .. :)
Quote from: colinjones on December 17, 2007, 01:36:50 AM
Totallymaxed -
Any update on this MSI board? How did you go with audio and CEC? What are your thoughts on the 7050PV from NVidia - looking at the specs they seem to be saying that this is the minimum for HD/1080p for Blu ray and HDDVD with HCPI... does that sound right?
As a result I was looking at the MSI K9NGM3(or 2 or 4!) which has 7050PV and nForce 630a, which an HDMI connector. Do you think that is necessary/beneficial or just stick with the 7329? Do you think that it is a problem that the K9NGM3 is only AM2 not AM2+ and so only has HyperTranport2.0 (1G rather than 2.6G that AM2+ supports)?
Really keen to get the best HDMI board first time without spending a lot of money!
Hi Colin,
As 1audio says CEC is still a long way off yet... I just wouldn't let that be a factor in your decision. As to which id best... the 7329 or K9NGM3 I really can't say. The 7050 is supported by the drivers in 0710 and as far we can tell works well (on other Mobo's). MSI have targeted the K9NGM3 hardware for high performance 1080i usage... so I would be very suprised if the basic hardware was not up to the job. We have not tested the 7329 at properly at 1080i yet I have to say. But we do not that this MB works well and we have had zero problems with our test units.
hmmm.... my problem is that the 7329 just doesn't seem to be available in Australia. Seems the US guys are having difficulty as well. Doing a search finds lots of hits in EU, especially DE and UK... don't suppose Convergent would do exports on these boards would you?! :)
BTW - the CEC is just something I am interested in, by no means is it factored into the decision. It is more about UI2/Alpha, and the performance to do HD. Problem is, nVidia seem to go out of their way to obfuscate their range and make it very difficult to differentiate the chipsets... They push the 7050PV hard as the platform for HD, yet most of the 6xxx series also seem capable, too. It "feels" like there is a dividing line where the lower series can do HD-ish, but peters out at some point just before full 1080i/p/HDDVD/Blu Ray, but is very difficult to quantify where :)
Quote from: colinjones on December 17, 2007, 12:02:38 PM
hmmm.... my problem is that the 7329 just doesn't seem to be available in Australia. Seems the US guys are having difficulty as well. Doing a search finds lots of hits in EU, especially DE and UK... don't suppose Convergent would do exports on these boards would you?! :)
BTW - the CEC is just something I am interested in, by no means is it factored into the decision. It is more about UI2/Alpha, and the performance to do HD. Problem is, nVidia seem to go out of their way to obfuscate their range and make it very difficult to differentiate the chipsets... They push the 7050PV hard as the platform for HD, yet most of the 6xxx series also seem capable, too. It "feels" like there is a dividing line where the lower series can do HD-ish, but peters out at some point just before full 1080i/p/HDDVD/Blu Ray, but is very difficult to quantify where :)
For reasons related to indemnity our insurers will not allows us to export to the US currently and we cannot re-sell bare mobo's outside the EEC. So on both counts I'd have to say no... sorry. We could sell you one of our NerveCenter 100's ( see http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Convergenthome ) but you can probably buy those barebones in OZ for far less money and do the install/setup yourself.