[Gllug] Wanted - low power consumption and two PCI slots

[John Winters]

I'm looking for suggestions about what sort of hardware to use in a home
server.

Currently I use a 1 GHz Mini-ITX box which does the job well apart from
one thing - it has has only one PCI slot.

Wanting two DVB-T tuner cards I casually replaced it a few months back
with an Athlon 2200 box which I had hanging around.  This worked fine
until I noticed (come the warmer weather) that it functions pretty much
like a fan heater and was costing about £20-25 more to run each month
than its predecessor.  I quickly swapped the Mini-ITX box back in and
since then have been running it with one PCI DVB-T card and one Freecom
DVB-T USB stick.  This is OK-ish, but every now and then the stick
crashes (the LED on it goes out and a USB disconnect event is logged)
and either MythTV or the V4L USB drivers do not cope well with this.
(This may have been the cause of my galloping processes a week or so
ago.)  It is necessary to re-boot the server each time this happens,
which isn't ideal because it has other functions as well.  I've had to
disconnect the USB stick because it's too much of a nuisance so I'm back
to one tuner card.

I've thought of putting the TV tuners in a separate box and having it
switch on only when needed, but the auto on/off functions in MythTV
don't really work properly for multiple boxes.

Can anyone suggest a good base platform which has:

	1) Low power consumption
	2) 2 (at least) PCI slots
	3) Suitable for 24/7 operation (so no crap fans)

TIA,
John


-- 
John Winters, Wallingford, Oxon, England
i = (free (NULL); i++);

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