Building HTPC and occasional gamer - help me finish spec please!

[grumpybeard]

Hey guys,

Plunged into building a HTPC and occasional gamer.

Plan to use it mostly for XBMC, so ideally Nvidia card as VDPAU hardware acceleration supported. Will partition for windows 7 and gaming.

Want system to be as quiet as possible. Ive already purchased the following:


Asus Maximus 2 Gene MATX board
Lian Li V351 Black case
Scythe mini Ninja cooler


Grateful for any suggestions on rest of spec, so need CPU, PSU, graphics card, memory, bd/dvd reader, want to keep costs reasonable, say another 400 quid max to complete system.

Particulary advice on PSU, and quiet Nvidia card that will fit case.

Im considering just getting an Intel C2D E5200, understand they clock very well if more ooomph needed??

Thanks in advance,
JP.

 

[grumpybeard]

Guys,

Does the following sound reasonable, any comments/suggestions gratefully accepted:

Gainward GeForce GTX 275 896MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card (Includes Terminator Salvation PC Game) £164.99

Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 450W ATX2.2 Modular SLi Compliant Power Supply £68.99

Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (WD10EADS) £61.99

Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 "LGA775 Core 2" 2.50GHz (800FSB) - Retail £51.99

Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel (KHX8500D) £37.98

Pioneer DVR-217FBK 22x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer LabelFlash ReWriter (Black) - OEM £21.99

Total inc vat: £419.43

 

[Moeks]

It should be fine, but when you say "occasional gaming" ...the one thing that strikes me is that you have probably rather overdone it with the gpu, if you only play games occasionally and they aren't the latest and greatest, then I see no reason to spend that kind of money on a gpu, why not get something cheaper, the ATI 4770 or a GeForce 250. What I would do though is spend the differance on the cpu instead and get a decent quad core, if you aren't primarily gaming with the system, I think it'll give you a better alround machine. I also wouldn't worry about GPU video decoding too much, the cpu can manage that just fine.

Also, I would buy a faster hard drive as the primary boot/apps drive and use the WD Greens for bulk storage, they only run at 5400 rpm so aren't that fast. A WD Black or similar would be much quicker and better suited to system drive operations.

 

[grumpybeard]

Hey Moeks,

Thanks very much for the suggestions. I say occasional gaming as my working day is fairly long, but when I get a chance I wanna play some good titles.

You're right though, as much as I like the idea of cranking up a good old cheap E5200, I think the small L2 cache will get choked.

So onward with trying to find a decent quiet GTX 260/GTX 275 for gaming and XBMC, but hoping to bag that bargain of an E8500 or Q9650 if such a thing exists.

Thanks again!