Spec me a £400 HTPC

Liggs · 26 Dec 2009 at 18:23

It needs to be able to play blu-ray and DVD. I'm going to run Media Portal on it but I'll set it up to fire up an external player for the bluray stuff.

I'll need a 1.5tb hard drive with it (just the one, I've already got one) and a universal remote as I've got about 20 million remotes already. Obviously case, CPU, MB.

I'm going to be hooking up to my sony home theatre system and my 40" TV. It needs to play really high quality files as I'm ripping straight to TS files without any quality loss (something my Xtreamer has trouble with).

I think that's everything.

Cheers guys,

PermaBanned · 26 Dec 2009 at 18:42

Just some cheap Athlon II base with a 785 chipset should do fine, probably won't even need a graphics card. There's a 64MB cache WD Green 1.5TB drive for about £80, should do you fine. Case is personal preference but i don't think you should be spending over £50, £60 at most on it.

That or get an Atom build, with a PicoPSU.

Liggs · 26 Dec 2009 at 18:47

Do you think it could handle blu-ray with the onboard stuff then?

PermaBanned · 26 Dec 2009 at 18:56

Well since having no dedicated graphics chip to speak of can still handle SD content pretty well i don't foresee any problems with that and HD. Of course, if you don't think it's enough you can always get a graphics card later.