I was wondering if any of you guys use some of the slim Thinkcentre / NetVista for Home Theatre?

I want to set up a budget system using Myth TV (ubuntu). Seen different models on eBay with Pentium 4 around 3GHz, use SATA HD and at least a PCI slot to add in a video card for the multimedia. Many are about $100.00 including s/h, so I would only need a large HD & PCI video card as an expense. This would give me an HTPC for about $200.00. Anybody already done this, or maybe used a full size desktop? But one that would have about the same hardware inside as the slim ones? How reliable are these models ?

http://yfrog.com/56ibmthinkcentrej

My other two choice would be a generic box with budget parts or a Mac mini. But the Mac mini would have to be maxed out already since the older models are not made to be upgraded. Either of these two would also fall close to the $200.00 budget of the slim IBMs.

I am in a similar situation. If I were you, I would get a ThinkCentre with good Pentium 4 and PCIe x16 slot for a dedicated video card to support hardware acceleration.

i would get a Thinkcentre that is capable of accepting a Core 2 Duo CPU, if you are getting a USFF or SFF thinkcentre remember to check whether the system actually has a PCI-express card slot, and not a DVI Add on slot.

I am running my Thinkcentre M55 SFF as a NAS, it is extremely reliable and CPU fan hardly comes on.

I have a Thinkcentre with a C2D ~2Ghz CPU and an nvidia Geforce super cheap 512MB PCIe Vid Card I use to run Media Portal and WMC, works great. The only reason I even needed the video card was so I could use HDMI through the DVI Connector.

I went down a somewhat similar road with a smaller barebone PC for a HTPC, which I regretted. My main complaint with it was the PSU was so underpowered, the fan in it ran all the time, which was annoying. Something like a NetVista is going to have PATA drives, which means 500GB is as large as you can go. If that's enough for you, the maybe it's worth a look. It's the same thing with the Thinkcenter. It probably only has one drive bay, which will limit your expandability. I ended up building my HTPCs. Building it is probably more expensive, but you can pick and chose your parts to get the way you want. The biggest noise makers are the CPU cooler and the PSU. That's where you want to get something good.

As far as SATA... I have an Xbox original with a 1TB hard disk in it (which also run linux and MythFrontend)... i used this:

$4.20 @ http://www.dealextreme.com/p/sata-hdd-t ... card-57841

Cheapo SATA--->IDE adaptor, no reason it couldnt be used in older desktops as well (had to hook it up to a desktop to lock it as part of the Xbox procedure)

Also, MythTV uses USB external drives REALLY well, my case only has room for 1 internal, there is a WD green drive there, then there are several WD drives in external enclosures mounted for use by MythTV.

And as far as horsepower goes, it really depends on how your recording... SD or HD... not much needed for a frontend(700MHz Xbox original works for SD). Our main Myth box is a frontend/master backend recording from STB's in SD through a PVR-150 and a PVR-500(3 tuners total)...

system.board.product = 'M3N78 PRO'
info.product = 'AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+' [2.9GHz 65W]
info.product = 'Future Technology Devices International Crystalfontz CFA632-USB LCD'
info.product = 'Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150'
info.product = 'WinTV PVR 500 (unit #1)'
info.product = 'WDC WD10EADS-00L' [S.M.A.R.T. Power_On_Hours: 20240 (2.31 years)]
In use 24/7 since: Oct 29, 2008

The main thing that will make a huge difference in what machine to use is what capture card you go with... hardware or software encoding, and whether you are recording in SD or HD.

Here is the usage from uptime i just got... load average: 1.01, 0.98, 0.80
currently recording SD on one tuner with a commercial flag job running... we have occasionally noticed some lag in the remote when the system is recoring 3 shows, flagging one, while watching a recorded show... rarely is all that going on (usually monday nights around 8pm ) that it's not an issue.

If you're going to use XBMC (which you absolutely should, as it's a fantastic, open-source HTPC solution), then you don't actually need much better than a P4, provided you get a good video card; it supports hardware acceleration, so there's really no need to beef up the CPU since it won't be used for decoding.

Noticed a lot of people mentioning the video card, keep in mind a mythtv setup needs a TV card, this is the one where you want hardware encoding. If not then the TV streams are processed by the CPU with a cheap TV tuner.

Playback is where the video card/cpu come into play. Main thing if your CPU is lower end is to look for VDPAU support in the video card. Since video decoding is done in dedicated hardware, all supported cards have the same level of performance. My Asus M3N78 PRO has onboard 8300 video, no need for a dedicated video card. Even before nVidia released binary drivers with VDPAU support, SD video was not an issue on our machine. We don't do HD yet so I can't comment there.

Here is a good read about what does what, check out the "User Results" about 2/3 down the page... also gives some insight to what machines people are using for HD...

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU