Hey all, Well as many of you will know I have not been around for a good while! I have been working, studying, moving city, country... but cutting to the chase I have about £500 (can go higher if needs be) to spend next month on an HTPC for my new flat. Will need to be able to play 1080p video. I am basically looking for suggestions for a motherboard, cpu, gpu and psu as I have no idea what I am looking for anymore... I have no need for hard drives or optical drives. Thanks!
I was thinking of building one of these myself. Small (16GB) SSD for my OS and a 2TB NAS for all my media. I would definitely go for a Mini ITX board. The AMD E-350 is a good low power processor for it... you can get a lot of Mini ITX boards with an AMD E-350 and a Radeon 6130.. which apparently performs really well with HD video at low power. You shouldn't need more than 2GB of RAM either. For Case and PSU the Antec ISK 310-150 is a really nice, discrete little case with a 150W PSU included which will power all that hardware and then some. Basically.. I've just told you to get what I'll be getting... except I'll have a Blu Ray Drive... Oh... and I did a preliminary "shop" at ebuyer.com and it all came to < £300.. including P&P
Cheers dude, will definitely keep that in mind. I am currently living at my parents in Brussels for the summer so will only be ordering this when I return back to Glasgow. I was thinking about getting a blu ray drive but I own no Blu Rays in the uk...
I would check the XBMC forums, there are a few good threads on there with advice on choosing your HTPC build. e.g. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=94199
