Soldato
- Joined
- 16 Nov 2003
- Posts
- 9,682
- Location
- On the pale blue dot
Hi guys.
While I'm more than happy chugging away with my P4 as my bedroom setup I'd like to put together a living room based box to serve digital TV, music, videos etc. Here are my initial thoughts on requirements:
One extra thing I was thinking was the ability to both serve media at the TV and from PCs around the house. That is couple hibernation, wake on LAN and a network connection so that the system can act as a media 'hub' of sorts if I decide I want to watch something in my room that I don't have on the HDD. This also means that the system may be sending video to more than PC/screen at a time therefore I am wondering about CPU/network bandwidth, though I'd imagine that the requesting PC would be doing the actual decoding. This is just an idea however, I'd rather sacrifice this ability if it would add hundreds to the price.
There are a couple of mATX boards out there that have integrated video and sound, will these do the job (no requirement to play games, though Aero would be nice) or should I fork out for separate sound/video cards?
Anyone who has anything similar, have I missed any common requirements here?
While I'm more than happy chugging away with my P4 as my bedroom setup I'd like to put together a living room based box to serve digital TV, music, videos etc. Here are my initial thoughts on requirements:
- Smallish form factor- no midi-towers and if I can help it (though unlikely) no riser cards.
- Silent.
- Cool to the extend that it doesn't overheat.
- HDMI/DVI/Component or one of these and a converter to the other two types including 1080p support.
- Multichannel audio and optical output.
- Digital (Freeview) TV recording, possibly with a dual tuner card.
- Digital radio (not 100% required though).
- A large hard drive (~750Gb?).
- A separate system disk for performance perhaps? I have a Raptor in my main system but it is noisy.
- Separate display such as LCD for time/currently playing tracks etc. I'd love to be able to use Windows Sideshow to play music without booting the machine, but I doubt that's possible currently.
- Low power consumption if it is idling.
- Card slots for SD etc.
- IR receiver for Media Centre remote.
- Budget of around £500.
One extra thing I was thinking was the ability to both serve media at the TV and from PCs around the house. That is couple hibernation, wake on LAN and a network connection so that the system can act as a media 'hub' of sorts if I decide I want to watch something in my room that I don't have on the HDD. This also means that the system may be sending video to more than PC/screen at a time therefore I am wondering about CPU/network bandwidth, though I'd imagine that the requesting PC would be doing the actual decoding. This is just an idea however, I'd rather sacrifice this ability if it would add hundreds to the price.
There are a couple of mATX boards out there that have integrated video and sound, will these do the job (no requirement to play games, though Aero would be nice) or should I fork out for separate sound/video cards?
Anyone who has anything similar, have I missed any common requirements here?
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