Equipment suggestions (1 Viewer)

[Tim Flavin]

I was searching through for recoomented hardware to see if I can justify the cost of a HTPC and I seem to see there are no postings more current than around Nov 02 regarding this subject. Surely much has changed with lower-price faster preforming hardware over the past 12 months. Please fill me in a bit.

 

[Jonny K]

It's hard to make recommendations. As for CPUs, I'd go with AMD since they're more cost effective for the same performance numbers. You probably won't need a 64 bit CPU for a HTPC, but it's now an option too. Regarding video cards, I'm not familiar with exactly what you need for an HTPC, but I can say that generally ATI video cards have been performing very well lately, and have been a good value. What other components do you need info on?


Jonny K.

 

[Ken Scott]

hes right with amd, but im more of a nvidia buff myself. all you'll really need is a 64mb card and a tv tuner if you want to record tv progs. and if u want to rip dvds get lots o' hard drive space. bigger 200 and 250gb hdds are getting pretty cheap these days. but one place you should go all out on is you soundcard. SOUNDBLASTER all the way. i got a SB audigy platinum EX and its awesome. the audigy2 series is great too.

 

[DeepakJR]

If hes gonna be outputting SPDIF then the sound card doesnt matter. As long as he has a mobo which has a digital out output it shouldnt matter. My old SB Live! 5.1 can output the SPDIF signal from PowerDVD perfectly to my reciver and can be had for around 20 dollars, there are of course cheaper alternatives which do the same. I assume Ken is using the SB decoder for his sound system.

A lower end Athlon(1700+ should be enough)provides great performance and can be had dirt-cheap. A Radeon 7000, which has had great performance on DVD's, can be had for no more than 30 dollars if you can find it, if not then newegg has a Radeon 9000 for around 60 dollars which should be more than enough for decoding DVD's. 512 megs of some DDR Corsair memory is also optimal. Ripping DVD's is frowned upon here, so I wont mention any of that, you should need no more than a 10 gig HD, all you would need installed is Windows, some kind of DVD player and Powerstrip to output in 1080i(if thats your intent). Overall it shouldnt cost more than 400 dollars not-including a monitor. This is of course if all you need it for is watching DVD's

L8rz,
Deepak Jr.