Moving house....new media network project

Banzai_Joe

Banzai_Joe

Banzai_Joe

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Hi all, your thoughts please.

I'm moving into a nice new house (so i don't want to rip walls apart to channel cat5 all over the place).

I'm going to be building some new rigs for our 3 boys.

This time round i'm thinking of building complete media suites for them, so essentially it will be:
a music centre
dvd player
tv tuner (maybe?)
games pc (obviously down to decent graphics)
and workstation (schoolwork)

I wanna be able to do away with their separate hi-fi's, tv's and dvd players.

Now, i'm not a noob in building pc's or networking, but i'd like your advise on what you'd use to build a media centre with (as i've never build one), ie. how small a case would you dare go for say a core2duo cpu and a nvidia 7900gs, 1 x dvd-rw, 1 x sata hdd, 2Gb ram. Probably Vista as well now.
I will also make them wireless (see my comment about NOT bashing walls around, although discrete trunking may be ok for cat5e cabling).
And considering i may use tv tuner cards, with a probable broadband connection of 4-10MBit do you think wireless 802.11g will handle the throughput?

I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this.
Alternatively I could buy another couple of xbox360's and give them more mediocre pc's, then they could link them all up as entertainment centres.

Thanks in advance. :)
 
If your thinking about having a centralised media store to handle music and videos then the wireless signal might not be up to streaming to lots at once.

As long as you go for some of the lower end C2D processors you should be able to get away with quite a small case, as they don't give off much heat at all.
 
To be honest id avoid wireless if possible, cat5 is a lot better, and there are studies going on atm on the potential dangers to health of wireless networking
its already been banned in some schools etc
 
TheKnat said:
What about the possibilities of network over power like THIS
Click to expand...

Good call dude, thanks. Its certainly worth looking at, but at £55 a pop, it'll cost me too much i think.

We'll see.

Any comments from anyone as regards the media centre setup?
 
k.Jacko said:
Any comments from anyone as regards the media centre setup?
Click to expand...

I got a Dell PC running Vista Ultimate as my media centre box and it runs OK apart from the occasional slow up. I think this is mainly due to me using on board graphics so you should be fine with this.

The biggest problem I think your going to have is that you need to make a call between storing all the files locally on each box, of storing them centrally. If you do it on each box then your going to have issues with making sure every machine has the same data on them (if thats what you want). If you store them centrally then you need a decent network to handle it :/

The IP over power devices are quite pricey but then so are the larger HDD you would need in the individual boxes to store the content 4 times over.
 
What about using the Antec Sonata II for the case? Its quite petit and it comes with a reasonable 450W PSU which would easilly manage a 7900GS and c2d system. £60 odd too :)
 
Jfan said:
To be honest id avoid wireless if possible, cat5 is a lot better, and there are studies going on atm on the potential dangers to health of wireless networking
its already been banned in some schools etc
Click to expand...

Wifi outputs at 0.1W, much much lower than your local radio station or mobile phone mast. ;)


As for case size a 7900gs isn't going to fit into most htpc cases.
 
I'm confused.

The OP reads that he wants his kids to have a PC each that's capable of running games, tv, video, music etc.

And everyone is thinking he wants a centralised media hub?! - Where'd that thought come from?

For general file transfering, internet use etc. WiFi will be fine, but for online and network gaming WiFi will suffer. I have a WiFi box just outside my room and if I use it then I have considerable lag in games, which is why I'm on a hardwired connection now.

As has been said, a low end C2D will be fine in a small case, and running Vista will also be no problem.

I think the idea is a very good one, if I had kids, I'd do that, it stops them wanting/needing loads of power consuming gear, and stops them from fighting over who's gear is better etc.

InvG
 
Not to fussed about centrally storing data on a NAS box or similar.
Its more of a 'project' for me and a single station media centre for the kids, to do away with tv, hi fi and dvd player.
The networking is obviously for the internet and some lan gmaing between us all etc.
You know what teenagers are like, so i shall be clamping down on permissions across each pc and the network. ;)
 
How does that relate to a centralised hub? I still don't understand that.

As the OP just said, a NAS box would be fine, all wired conenctions of course.

But he's said he just wants to build the kids PCs that'll do everything that their current stuff does, so he can do away with it all.

Good idea, and I hope the project goes well, personally I'd do some discrete cable managment round the house. If the kids decide they want to move their desks etc. then it's their choice and they can move onto wireless.

I'm moving into a new house in August (uni), and plan on cabling up the house to have all rooms (not including the bathroom, but maybe including the kitchen) on a cat5e cable, so that all my mates can use the internet and network easily. We also plan on having a NAS or server, so that'll be wired in too.

Cables are easy enough to hide, it's just effort routing them out of the way.

InvG
 
InvaderGIR said:
How does that relate to a centralised hub? I still don't understand that.
Click to expand...

My fault that one. I assumed that if he wanted to have a media box in every room and do away with hi-fi's that you would be looking at one copy of the files to make life easier (esepecially as 360's were mentioned).
 
I have 3 pc's and 2 laptops on wireless and get no ingame lag whatsoever, thats with 54g and 4mb connection.. so maybe your connection was crap or routing issue

I stored all films etc on my main pc and gave the kids read access so they could watch films, play music etc streamed over the wireless. I rarely used my main pc at the time so cant comment on lag etc but just as a fileserver I reckon a c2d 2gb ram and 54g should do the trick tbh

if not going centralised then 10mb with 54g should me more than ample and a decent router (I personally have a linksys and a mix of onboard wireless, a belkin usb and 2 linsys usb adapters)

am sure someone will state me wrong but I am speaking from personal experience
 
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I played CS 1.5 on my wireless laptop which had 11b and it was perfect, I actually did better than I did on my PC which was using cat5 lol. Streaming video over 11b is very naff though.
 
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