Cheap HTPC Spec

[ssmacc]

A mate of mine is thinking of buying the below, any reason why he shouldn't? he'll be using it just for film playback (non-gamer), hopefully stream media (.mkv) files, can this be done wirelessly. will be running Vista 64 so gone for 4GB.

Cheaper the better so opinons welcome.

Your basket
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Pioneer DVR-215DSV 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Silver) - OEM £15.99
(£18.79) £15.99
(£18.79)
Samsung SpinPoint T 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD501LJ) £48.99
(£57.56) £48.99
(£57.56)
Antec NSK 2480 Desktop Case - 380W Earth Watts PSU £57.99
(£68.14) £57.99
(£68.14)
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G Micro-ATX (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £52.99
(£62.26) £52.99
(£62.26)
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2 (OCZ2P800R22GK) £22.99
(£27.01) £45.98
(£54.02)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+ 2.70GHz (Socket AM2) - Retail £56.99
(£66.96) £56.99
(£66.96)
Keysonic Wireless Keyboard/Touchpad ACK-540RF £24.99
(£29.36) £24.99
(£29.36)

Total : £369.97 (all in)

 

[stealthgeek]

4gb might be overkill, I used to get away with 1GB on XP Media Center. Unless you want it to become a blu-ray HTPC in the future, in which case, get the 4gb

 

[oli collett]

4gb might be overkill, I used to get away with 1GB on XP Media Center. Unless you want it to become a blu-ray HTPC in the future, in which case, get the 4gb

why 4gb for bluray??

 

[BillytheImpaler]

It can be done wirelessly, but WLAN connections are usually flaky as all heck. You might not notice every dropped connection when surfing the web or whatnot, but you will notice it every time it happens when you're streaming a high-bandwidth film across the network. I highly recommend that you run a network cable to the HTPC or use powerline networking for the purpose of network reliability.

I use 1 GiB of RAM in my HTPC and never touch half of it except for caches. I run 64-bit Linux though, with a somewhat stripped-down environment for a smaller footprint. Since RAM is so cheap right now the difference between 2 and 4 GiB in price is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. More RAM is always better.