Do I need a graphics card?

[drand]

Hi,

I love this site!

I'm planning my own build which I hope will eventually have, amongst other things, a mythTV backend to serve TV over ethernet to various XBMC clients.

Anyway, my question is - do I need a discrete graphics card to accompany a TV tuner card? Does it depend on the card, cpu etc?
For info, the CPU is a core 2 duo e5400 with 4 (soon to be 8) GB RAM and I would probly get a pcie x1 dvb-t2 card (looking at tbs 6280/6284, but I'm interested in whether there's a generic answer rather than just for these cards).

Also, if I do need a graphics card would a PCI do the job? Reason being I want to keep my pcie x16 slot free for a SAS HBA in the future, and I'd rather not have to buy a dual-slot pcie x16 board as well as all the other stuff I need.


Cheers!

[Andy Horn]

Hi and welcome to forum.

I don't use a graphics card in my server and so far I know Ian doesn't, it really isn't necessary to have a graphics card in a headless server, as there is monitor is attached.

However I am not sure if mythTV requires such a card, although when I had mythTV installed it never seemed to need a graphics card.

There be also an issue with the server OS not having the drivers in it's kernel, you can if you wish recompile the kernel to include the drivers.

Hope this helps....

Andy

[drand]

Thanks for the response.

I'm not worried about graphics for a desktop environment etc. becuase the server will be headless (and the board has built in graphics), more from the perspective of whether the tuner card needs a dedicated graphics card to help package the decoded TV signal up and send it over ethernet via the tv backend (myth or whatever) to the client - should probably have phrased the question like this in the first place.

So I will do a bit more research and proceed on the asumption that the graphics is only needed at the client end for TV.

Good point re. graphics drivers in the server OS, ta.