Media PC Build

beer_puppy · 7 Feb 2006 at 05:16

Hi, gonna be building my first media pc so for i've got it down to...

Gigabyte K8NMF-9 nForce4 Micro ATX (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard
AMD Opteron UP 144 San Diego 1.8GHz 1MB Cache (Socket 939) - Retail
Corsair 1GB DDR Value Select PC3200 CAS2.5 Kit (2x512MB)
XFX GeForce 7300 GS 512MB DDR2 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 NCQ 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM
NEC ND4551 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Silver) - OEM
Seasonic S12 430W Silent ATX2.0 Power Supply
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500 Media Centre Edition Dual TV Tuner
Microsoft Remote Keyboard for Windows XP Media Center Edition - Retail
Microsoft Windows XP Media Centre 2005 Edition - OEM
And a Micro ATX case i have

is there any better options? and i have a few questions..
1. Do i need a Graphic Card? (not going to be playing games on it)
2. I want to get free View tv aswell as hooking up my sky dish will this tv tuner do this?? (e.g. watch sky one off the dish and record E4 off free view?)
3. Will the MCE keyboard work ok with the IR reciever that comes with the TV tuner??

Rocker · 7 Feb 2006 at 10:06

I am also considering building a media center, i am on a low budget one and was just wondering, do u really need such a high spec?

afraser2k · 7 Feb 2006 at 10:48

It depends on what exactly you're wanting to do with the media centre. For example, I'm running Windows XP MCE2005 (OEM) on my Shuttle SB75G2 hooked up to NTL Digital for PVR purposes as well as housing my mp3's and playing DVD's. The specification is:

Shuttle SB75G2
Intel P4 'Northwood' 2.4GHz
512Mb Crucial PC2700 DDR
Club3d FX5200 (passive)
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350
Maxtor MaxLine III 300Gb SATA
NEC ND3540A DVD+RW

One thing about Freeview to check before buying any of the products is to check your signal strength. I made this mistake to my cost as the signal was too weak to receive a good signal and the TV would skip or lose it completely every few minutes.

As for a non-games machine you don't need a powerful graphics card and I only used the FX5200 due to the features of being passive (at least the model I bought anyway) and connections for tv-out.

Hard drive size I'd recommend 160Gb and above as that'll give you a good amount of recording space plus any other media you want to keep on the machine.

You might also consider noise as I'd expect the original posters machine would be quite noisy and annoying (my Shuttle isn't too loud once it's running thanks to quiet fan).

I suspect the high-spec media centre's are for people that plan on doing a lot of media encoding/conversion. At the moment I don't bother with that so I'm not sure about how long it would take on my machine. I also need to buy an IR Blaster for my NTL box to receive the MCE remote signal, whatever that is.

a1ex2001 · 7 Feb 2006 at 12:26

You definately don't need a high spec my media center runs a passively cooled 600MHz VIA C3 which is more than up to playing MP3's etc the mobo has built in grahpics with a hardware DVD decoder so I don't have to worry about processing power for that. You'll probably want more guts for PVR purposes and I'd actually lean toward a P4 as hyper threading will give a noticeable performance boost if your watching one chanel and recording another.

afraser2k · 7 Feb 2006 at 16:43

Have you tried using the VIA C3 600MHz as the basis for tv recording? I'm assuming you're using one of the Epia series of motherboards for this. I've got an Epia M6000 at home and I was considering putting my Hauppauge card in that instead for near-silent HTPC/PVR duties.