Hey guys haven't really been posting here for a while due to the real world creeping into my life. I thinking about dumping my 24" core2 iMac, in search of something slightly different that allows me to play more games, as my free time has increased considerably scince i left school. I have been thinking about grabing a cheap Mac Mini off the dreaded fleabay, a cheap hd tv preferably 30" + (but not too big as my room is quite small so the viewing distance isnt going to be to long), then a cheap 360 to get some proper gaiming going? What do you guys reckon? will it be worth it as i am starting to get really bored with having a big monitoer to watch dvds on but some s**t 14" tv to watch the telly. It also means i can grab some cheap hd-dvds for some hd goodness (thats right Doug!!). Can anyone suggest any good tv's for around the £400 to £500 range? shouldnt be too big but hopefully the quality shouldnt be absoulute shite either! I want to use the Mac Mini as a sort of htpc and hook it up to the tv and use it as a monitor as well? what do you guys think? will it handle it? (of course i should be able to hook up a whopper of a external hdd to keep my media needs at bay) any suggestions would be welcome.... thanks
why would you ever want to buy a mac mini? get a real computer. edit: i feel i should expand on this, it's not just mac hate. the mac mini and the imac suffer from all the disadvantages of laptops (expensive parts, little to no upgradability, poor cooling) without any of the advantages of laptops (portability). if you really want a mac, go for one of their laptops - they are really nice. otherwise, get a cheap desktop pc (not a dell, buy parts) and then over time upgrade it to where you need it to be.
I am with supertoad, get a PC. However, if you are getting a PC, don't go down to level like these 200$ Dell laptops (my expression to say pay minimum possible and expect a super computer witch is also problem free and exceptional quality). Remember something, bigger your display, the more powerful video card you will need to render the same level of graphics. Hmm... for some reason the forum says that my message is too short... Why can't I get straight to the point?
For the TV, we have a nice 32" Samsung tv at home, I will try and find a link to it. And are you sure you need one that big? IMO ours is fine for a pretty big sitting room. edit: but then we did have a 20 year old 14" one for a long time before that in a slightly smaller room!
If you like mac (join the club) you're better off going either a low end iMac or macbook and getting a 360 and tv. I have the original intel imac and it's still pretty zippy (the new models are heaps better, even the low end ones). Even if you want to game a bit on your pc, just get bootcamp, the gfx are good for light gaming
360s seems very popular for gaming these days and they are very good. My problem with console is the price of games and I really don't get along well with the controllers! As for advice on macs, I'm the last person to ask on that one. But I should imagine any PC or Mac available today will do basic htpc function OK as it's hardly demanding stuff (unless your including encoding etc as htpc functions).
Hey guys thanks for the replys, i already have bootcamp and i can play cod4 online at pretty good frame rates but with the quality set low to medium. I am sort of leaning towards a samll laptop as i'm now in my gap year and i want to go traveling for a few months so a small laptop to cart around would be handy. I dnt know why but i always seem to lean towards Macs beacuse of their sheer simplicity, everything just seems to work, and look good. but i do miss things on windows, hence having bootcamp. However if i were to get a small laptop i am certainly not gonna go for a mac book beacuse quite frankly they suck for the price! Maybe a small dell laptop.. would a small laptop be able to handle having a full hd tv as its main monitor (when at home)?
Just make sure that your lapy has an Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 3100, or a Geforce 7300M or better, with dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM or more (if you have more, you can disable Windows pagefile without any issue, in the hope to gain some battery life), and you are set to play your movies. If you travel I suggest to backup your DVD movies onto your HDD as ISO, and use a tool like Deamond Tools to read them (and bypass the copy protection), Doing so should have battery life. Also a larger 9-cell battery is always great. My brother Dell XPS 12inch wide 1220M Laptop (does not exists anymore) has 7 hours of battery life with a 9cell battery, blue-tooth off, and screen brightness to minimum (wireless is on, so is page file, and has a Geforce 7300M).
