Basic Questions

H

Hollow4

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 11, 2003
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how much horse power and RAM are really needed. i have a feeling that i will be getting a ASUS socket A motherboard and 2 120 gig IDE harddrives in a few days. i already aquired a used 350 watt anec PSU and i was wondering how fast of a proc do i really need. i want to record TV and play music through my stereo. Im trying to build on a tight budget and i would need to buy a Capture card, MCE, CPU, RAM, and a soundcard. Id say roughly 300-350 would be my total budget.

i was thinking something along the lines of a MCE pvr150 package from pc alchemy (which goes for 200ish)

and leaving about 150 for a proc, RAM and a soundcard with optical out. probably a 2800xp, 512 RAM and 50 for a sound card. will it work smoothly i guess is what im asking

cheers
 
XP 2800+ would work fine for most HTPC needs (I'm using the same CPU in mine) as long as you get a video capture card that has the encoder built on (like the PVR-150 you mentioned) it wont tax the CPU very much. 512 MB is the sweet spot for HTPC's as well. And for the sound card I like the M-Audio Revolution 7.1, but even if you get a Socket A motherboard that has the Soundstorm setup, it really works great for no additional cost.
 
chaintech av-710 is a good budget card for optical out as well. same chipset as many of the bigboy cards for not much money.
 
what it all comes down to for me is what im gona be pulling out of an old system. i have an athlon 2800xp with a gig of Ram and 9800 AIW. well the damn thing just reboots itself with no rhyme or reason. this is my folks computer. well i swapped out the psu, and what a bitch that was, had to remove everything from the case. well its still rebooting randomly. so my next step is to replace mobo, video card and Harddrive, with the video card and harddrive being things they wanted changed. now im concern that they are gonna drop a whole lot of money, on the order of about 500 into a dying system but im gonna get parts out of it. but if i can just convince him to spend a little more hell be set to jet with a better comp and a little more on the upgrade path. plus ill get a complete system out of it. the only extra things he would need to buy would be a venice core, 146 bucks, and some dual channel ram, 86 for a gig. seems to me the better thing would be to upgrade and let me deal with the wierd computer.

anyways thanks. im glad ill be near some sort of sweet spot with whatever i get out of this.

cheers (now to find a case to hold it all)
 
Mine started out with a 1900+, now it's got a Mobile AXP @2.2Ghz and when I have the cash prepared I'm planning to moving to a client/server setup with an A64 X2 or a Dual Opteron for the server (with a dual CPU mobo ;) ) and a regular A64 3000+ Venice in the Living room client box.

Depending on what software you're going to use you can use a 800Mhz P3 (non MCE) or a 1.6Ghz P4 (MCE) at the lowest.
 
dont you think its a little overkill to run dual core, or dual A64's for a file server. its not like your running enterprize software. it might just be me, but my server was serving up files to 4 comps at a pretty good clip with out any hiccups. i guess im just curious as to why you would do that for a server and not a desktop in the home situation.
 
Because the server is going to be a couple of terabytes (2.3 IIRC) and used for DVD storage, the DVD ripper and encoder is MP aware so why not? It'll also be used for as a FTP server as well as a few other things. It's not a straight up "file server." ;)
 
IDversusEGO said:
chaintech av-710 is a good budget card for optical out as well. same chipset as many of the bigboy cards for not much money.
Click to expand...


That's what I went with, was $27/shipped from NewEgg. Sounds awesome, and I have the ability to use optical, so there's an update path.
 
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