On Mar 15, 11:25*am, "e.w." <ew200...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am planning a Media Center PC project and have a few questions on
> selecting parts. Here's what I have so far...
>
> Case: Antec Fusion Silver
> Motherboard: ASUS P5GC-MX/1333
> Processor: Intel Pentium E2160 Allendale 1.8GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core
> RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 512MB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
> KVR667D2N5/512
> DVD-ROM: LITE-ON Black IDE DVD-ROM Drive Model DH-16D2P-04
>
> Although I have used one hard drive in my desktops, I have been told
> that it's better to have the OS installed on a smaller C: drive, with
> all of the data stored on a larger D: hard drive because of improved
> seek time when running the OS. If so, how should I split about 400-GB?
>
> Would a 1.8-Ghz "Allendale" Pentium and 1GB of RAM (667-MHz) be enough
> to run Windows XP MCE 2005 including media player, DVR, winTV, etc?
>
> What should I be looking for in terms of a video card? The motherboard
> slot is PCI-Express 16. My desktop has a 64MB Radeon and plays video
> fine so would 256-MB be enough for most media center applications?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help.
I suggest you get the biggest HD you can to start with, the bigger,
the better. I would skip the 400GB HD and get a 750GB or larger.
Media PCs tend to turn into defacto servers if you have a home network
and everybody else wants to put their stuff on it too. If you get a
small HD it will fill up quickly, especially if you use WinTV to
record TV programs and don't recode with DivX or Xvid. If you have a
lot of DVDs and CDs and want to rip them to the media box then you
will also need a lot of space for them. Your case and motherboard are
your limiting factors, you can only fit in and connect a certain
amount of HDs.
Your CPU and RAM will be OK for the media box in general. A faster
CPU and RAM can make video conversion much quicker but if you get
something that can do batch conversions, eg Dr DivX, then you can
schedule the comp to do that during your work or sleep time, etc.
The amount RAM on the video card is not that important for video play-
back but the GPU does make a difference. At this time, ATI cards are
a bit in front of nVidia for hardware video decoding in HD formats.
Have a look at the HD 3650s. The HD3450s may be cheaper option but I
have not seen their details yet but you can check that out for
yourself.
Think about networking. If your board on the media box has 1Gb
networking and it is connected to a gigabit switch then you should be
able to stream to another 3-4 computers at the same time as watching a
movie on the media box without stutters, depending on the codec used
(excludes HD DVD and Blu-Ray).
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