[mythtv-users] k7S5A board, do XP-M cpus work?

[Anthony Vito]

> I see that I have a K7S5A motherboard that
> can have its bios flashed to accept an XP-2600 cpu, and I can upgrade to
> 2x512 MB 266DDR.

If you can change the multipler in that board, it might be worth it.
Otherwise, ditch it and get something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813138234 .
That's what I run. A mobile XP 2800 on it running at ~2.08Ghz with
166x12.5 . I think it might only be 1.45 vcore too. In any case, it's
cooled with a 120mm fan pulling air through small holes in the top of
the media case and blowing down on the CPU heat sink. There is no
small fan attached to the CPU heat sink itself. I use the onboard
nvidia video and run 1080i HD streams with deinterlace just fine. This
machine is PXE booted and pulls an NFS root from a server.

There are a lot of ways to build mythTV and get it to work. I
generally pay a few extra dollars to save myself a lot of pain later
on.

> I have the board, a Plextor TV402U USB 2.0 tuner, and a case (I have the box
> working with a 1.2 GHz Duron and 192 MB of SDRam).  I'll have to buy the cpu
> and memory (and a USB 2.0 card) for this planned backend.

Why did you get a USB 2.0 tuner when you didn't even have the USB 2.0
card? Hawk it on ebay and get a PVR 150/250 or 500 ... depending on
your needs.

While were at it.... You didn't mention anything about HighDef
programming.... If you're not going to do HighDef (or many tuners)
there really isn't any point in going through all this pain to upgrade
the CPU and memory... the Duron will be fine.

> Looking at Pricewatch, the only XP-2600, XP-2500, XP-2400 cpus I see that are
> reasonable (below $100) seem to be the mobile XP-M-2600 and lower speed
> mobile cpus.  Can this board or any desktop  motherboard use an XP-M cpu
> without problems, will I run into problems, or it won't work at all, etc.

It will work if you check your BIOS and see if there is a manual
multipler adjustment... but again... why all the upgrades for standard
def TV?

> I'll be using Debian Sarge (if it works, MythTV appears to have hit either
> Sarge or backports in the last week), with a 2.6.11-k7 or later kernel, or if
> Sarge is no good I'll go to unstable with the latest unstable kernel.

Not to fan the distro war. ( Honestly ) but this seems like your first
myth install. I would suggest Ubuntu. If you have experience with
Debian, you will be right at home, and you'll find more community
support for all the problems you'll encounter ( there are many many
ubuntu mythtv users )

> Does everyone's hands start to sweat and shake when the possiblity of actually
> getting a MythTV setup working enters the realm of possibility?

eh, not really Kurt, I just get the task done and then enjoy the shows ;)

--
Anthony Vito
anthony.vito at gmail.com