Another "spec me up" request!

[Miles_stylus]

Sorry to do this to you however I have had a mooch about the forum - and very good it looks to - lots of helpful experts so my hopes are high! - however I have not seen someone attempting exactly what I'm trying to do.

I want a SFF PC to go into the kitchen. It will be driving a large (ish) LCD monitor and outputing sound to an amp which will drive the 5 speakers around the kitchen.

The uses will be:
PVR (digital HD tuner would be very nice)
playing DVDs
Internet (preferably at the same time as TV so I can be on the net whilst the kids are watching a DVD, TV or PVR content)
Some office activity - again all in the kitchen together and I'm finishing off a presentation or report etc, or one kid is doing homework etc.
Able to play video stored on a NAS elsewhere
Possibly about to act as a playback for my Video camera.
Some very limited gaming (if only to show off the LCD and the PC - shallow I know but there you go)

I have just got a buffalo Draft N wireless router and cards and ideally would like to be able to put the card into the box so that I have one flavour on all the PCs in the house. I also understand that the N system is better at dealing with range and faster so should be able to deal with HD content in the kitchen

Whilst I am on the ideal I would want to be able to record and watch different channels (or better yet record two channels).

The system needs to be quiet, maybe not silent however I would prefer that I can't hear it when more than 1 - 1.5m away from it. The PVR we have in the front room is rather noisey and you are really aware of it when just relaxing or talking and that is from 6m away. We will be sitting down 1-2m from this box so this is quite important

I am looking at Shuttle and the "g" cases look rather nice, however if I have to go larger to get what I need so be it.

I have never looked at SFF before and have certainly never built a machine. How easy is this and if I bottle it are their people out there who can help with the building element.

Many thanks in advance.

Miles

 

[Tute]

Do you have a budget?

 

[Miles_stylus]

Budget? I don't really have one to be honest. I would normally expect to spend in the region of 1-2K on a new PC but if I can save money I will

Thanks

Miles

 

[Tute]

I'm not really much of a pro on this - my PC is a gaming machine so i'm not really sure what cards etc you would need to achieve what you want, hopefully someone else passing by will help in that department.

But, given that you're going to have at least 1 PCI card in the system (i'm guessing the TV card is one) then i'd warn you away from the Shuttles. They're small and compact but if you ever wanted to put a video card in there it might give airflow issues, and I think it would be far too cramped for a dual slot cooler.

I'd give the nod to something like the V300, in my opinion this is the best looking case of all the mATX ones. As long as you don't go for an excessively large video card that should fit no problems at all (the larger cards require dremmeling the FDD bay IIRC).

I reckon you could get something like a 7600GT in there, which would give you more than enough power in case you wanted to play the odd game, plus they're pretty cheap cards, and wouldn't make a lot of difference to the overall cost.