Core System

[speed]

Hi All

New to the forum and just about to start my First MCE I was wondering if a dual Xeon system with super micro mobo and 4gig of ram 2X1000 LAN cards Win-Tv 350PVR Card  is a good core system and can you use the original Xbox as a media manager any thoughts Thanks in advance
Speed

[colinjones]

depends how old the Xeons are! but if less than 5 years it sounds like over kill. Most people can easily get away with 1GB. You need to look to your video chipset for compatibility more than anything else (closely followed by sound and NIC chipsets) No, Xbox is no good for this.

[speed]

Thanks for the reply

The Xeons are about 5 years old 2. something lol I am using the server for a beyond TV setup now   when you say I need to watch the video and LAN etc... are you talking for the media managers or are you talking the core system this core system will be just that a core not a highbred my media mangers are well the Xbox is out LOL
System 1
Abit mobo with HDMI 1 gig/nic 2 gigs ram onboard sound Intel 2.2 Duo

System2   is a shuttle system with HDMI etc...

System3 is same as system1
Any thoughts

depends how old the Xeons are! but if less than 5 years it sounds like over kill. Most people can easily get away with 1GB. You need to look to your video chipset for compatibility more than anything else (closely followed by sound and NIC chipsets) No, Xbox is no good for this.

[colinjones]

for a dedicated core only the NICs are relevant (above and beyond making sure that the mobo generally is compatible with Kubuntu 0710 of course)

[los93sol]

Something I'm curious about regarding core systems, when streaming video to the MD's is the decoding done on the core or on the MD?  The reason I ask is because I'd like to know if I could put a beastly video card in my core and get away with lower end cards in my MD's without seeing a performance hit.

[tkmedia]

Something I'm curious about regarding core systems, when streaming video to the MD's is the decoding done on the core or on the MD?  The reason I ask is because I'd like to know if I could put a beastly video card in my core and get away with lower end cards in my MD's without seeing a performance hit.

Other way around... you can have a low end card at the core. The heavy lifting is done at the MD's



Tim

[krys]

depends how old the Xeons are! but if less than 5 years it sounds like over kill. Most people can easily get away with 1GB. You need to look to your video chipset for compatibility more than anything else (closely followed by sound and NIC chipsets) No, Xbox is no good for this.

Are you sure about 1GB being enough? Maybe something is wrong with my system, but my physical memory usage usually hovers around 3Gb. This is on a dual core 3.4ghz machine.

edit* Nevermind, I was just chatting on IRC and was told that the computer will basically make use of whatever you give to it, so this is normal, and having less would be ok. I checked and only 20% of the mem was going to applications, 74% was being used for disk caching

[colinjones]

Correct, it will always be close to 100% - note this is true for Windows machines as well for exactly the same reasons! Common idea just that in a Windows task manager window it only displays a graph based on the lower value (actual useage) so it is a little less misleading, but you can still see other numbers in that window that will reflect what is really going on.

Col.