Media Centre PC Build Please !

Conanius

Conanius

Conanius

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
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Not got a clue what I need, so appreciate guidance. Only kit I have that can transfer over is .....
DVD drive
DVD RW drive
Seagate Baracuda 250 gig drive
WD Raptor 74 Gig drive
Creative Labs Extreme Gamer Soundcard

Now, I'm getting a Sony Vaio AR21-s laptop, which I think will be beefy enough for gaming, so just want this for watching films on, recording TV, recording TV to DVD, that sort of stuff. Want twin tuner capabilities (Freeview) EPG etc,

So basically, spec me a reasonable case, psu, mobo, gfx, etc etc to do this.... cheers !

Budget wise, cheap as possible really...
 
what cpu make are you thinking of going for? AMD or Intel?

also do you want it HD ready as well? if so i would go for a Nvidia 6600 or better
some built on 6100 cards are ok but you might get some slowdown on rendering on some higher rez vids

also what kind of case you thinking of?
Desktop? Min/Mid Town? Sff?

silverstone do some well nice HT-Cases but your talking money for them
they start from £80.00 +

there are cheaper cases on the market but you have to find them from another retailer. and the same goes for silverstone cases as it seems ocuk don't stock them now days
 
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AMD Sempron 64 3400+ (Socket AM2) CPU - Retail £39.99
Akasa AK-ICR-01 Internal Card Reader £9.99
Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T-500 Dual Freeview TV Tuner £61.99
Crucial 512MB (2x256MB) DDR2 PC2-4200C4 Dual Channel Kit £39.99
Abit KN9 nForce Ultra (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £43.99
Leadtek GeForce 7100 GS Turbo Cache 512MB (PCI-Express) £24.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB ST3500630AS SATA-II 16MB Cache £108.99
Antec NSK2400 Desktop Case - 380W SmartPower PSU £49.99
Microsoft Windows XP Media Centre 2005 Edition - OEM £65.99


VAT - £79.95
Shipping - £10.95
Total - £536.81

You don't need too much power to run a media centre, the cpu/ram spec above is a bit better than mine, im running an old socket 754 sempron 3200 and it runs fine.

It includes a dual freeview tuner so you can watch and record at the same time, and as for the hard drives, i would use the raptor for the OS, and the 250 and the 500 specced for the storage. you could save money and drop the 500 to a smaller drive, but mce records tv at 4gig an hour, and my 500 gig storage is already full!

The tuner does come with a remote, but for the best experience i would recommend splashing out on the official MS remote and media centre keyboard (the remote comes with the transiever that is needed for set top boxes and/or the media keyboard) The keyboard is brilliantly designed to be used while sitting on a couch, and has a built in mouse. If you're planning on using this in your front room, the media keyboard is a big benefit.

I've also added a card reader which always comes in useful, but can be removed to save money if you dont use memory cards.

The case is the cheapest media styled case i can find, and it comes with a 380w psu, which should be fine.

Again, the graphics card is the cheapest available, if you're after a high Def output you would need to upgrade the graphics, but i don't think that is really needed until high def media is more mainstream.
 
I agree with the above spec. Don't waste too much money on high spec cpu or more than 1 gig of ram.

Also, I'd deffo not bother with the raptor as it will be far to loud for a media centre. Just use the Seagate on it's own. If your still short of somewhere to put the raptor then I can tell you that they go pretty well on that auction site. I recently got £50 for my 36gig raptor :D

Also in the above spec, don't forget to get the MCE remote (essential) and a wireless KB&M
 
I would definietly not skimp on the CPU, as HD material is quite demanding. Unless you upgrade CPU later on.

1GB of RAM is standard, my HTPC runs well over 512MB with applications running.

Don't forget remote control.
 
cheers for the advice so far.

I will be using it for HD, and id prefer to be able to just set this up and not have to worry about it again for quite some time...
 
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