Hi all I have browsed these forums for a while and have decided it was time to sign up. I'm in the process of putting together a specification for a mates Media Centre PC. I am then going to help him build it (as it will be his first PC build). Budget: - £400 - £450 Main uses of intended build: - It will be a Media Centre PC, used for watching and recording TV and watching DVDs and Blu-Rays. It is also likely to house his music collection. Parts required: He has already brought a case (Silverstone LC13-E) and a TV Tuner Card (WinTV-NOVA-TD 500). At the moment, this is the spec that I have in mind: Processor: AMD Phenom X4 955 Black Edition - £88.74 - scan.co.uk CPU Cooler: - Artic Cooling Freezer 13 - £19.07 scan.co.uk Motherboard: Asus M5A88-M AMD 880G - £77.86 - scan.co.uk I have to admit, Motherboards are a weakness of mine - I'm not too clued up when it comes to the differences between chipsets, however, I like the fact that this Motherboard has onboard graphics will save money on not needing a dedicated Graphics Card RAM: - 4GB Corsair Vengeance 1,600MH - £40 - scan.co.uk Power Supply - Not sure - open to recomendations Hard Drive - 2TB Western Digital Green - £55 - scan.co.uk DVD-RW: - LG GH22NS50 - £15.00 - scan.co.uk Blu-Ray Writer: - LG BH10LS30.AUAU10B - £65.00 - scan.co.uk Note - Mate has asked for 2 Optical drives Wireless: - Can anyone recommend a Wireless N Card? Monitor resolution: - It will be connecting to a HDTV - 1080p Will you be overclocking: - no Any advice will be appreciated - thanks in advance.
First of all welcome to the forums! Overall definitely an ok build, though if media is all it's going to be used for you could get away with a bit lesser CPU, esp if not OC'ing--and if you DO get the 955 then OC it anyway, it likes it Mobo is fine for what he needs, though media cards like a HD 5450 are so cheap now you could probably dump the onboard GPU in favor of a cheaper board. Either way, no problem there. For PSU anything over 500W-ish should be fine, I personally usually vouch for Corsair, and steer away from OCZ regardless of their attractive prices. I don't see why he wants 2 optical drives but whatever, not here to judge. Personally I always go for 2 hard drives instead (one for OS other for the data). Can't recommend an N card as I always go to great lengths to hardwire Gigabit (no pun intended) but anything from a reputable brand should do (D-Link, Linsys, etc) For media purposes I really like XBMC over Windows Media Center, but that's really just a matter of preference and need for customization/control.
Cheers for the advice I did think about going for a slightly lesser CPU but reckon that the 955 offers the best combination of price and performance and I might be able to talk my mate into Overclocking at a later stage. I'm glad I asked for advice on the PSU because I was going to go for a 430W model. Never mind, I now have my eye on the Corsair 600W CX Series V2 from Scan @ £50. I did think about going for 2 Hard Drives, but will probably go with creating a small(ish) partition for the OS and few apps, having the remainder of the drive for media files. I'll put the proposed spec forward and see what my mate says (he's the one paying for it after all) ;-)
I know you were probably asking about hardware spec, but this man speaketh the truth. Once you set up the XBMC media libraries properly, letting it scrape all the metadata, I haven't seen anything that matches it. The only disadvantage to XBMC is that it does not support live TV. You can connect it to a backend TV server, such as MythTV, but it doesn't natively support TV tuners.
That motherboard is AM3+ so you can upgrade it to Bulldozer at a later date if you like - a decent investment with tons of power. 880G will playback and accelerate Blu-ray just fine and it uses standard Catalyst drivers so you get plenty of regular software support. You don't need an i3 unless you really want particular processing features of ClearVideo or QuickSync Video transcoding. HOWEVER Wait 2 weeks for our FM1 boards. They are being formally announced next week and APUs should be arriving within this timescale too. The in-built Radeon graphics will be much more power efficient and capable than the 880G, and the APUs will still be good value too. Even an A4-A6 will be ideal for a HTPC. I would advise a 380-430W Antec Eco Green - great quality, extremely quiet, nice and cheap. You really don't need high power for that setup.
If I was building the Media Centre PC for myself I would most probably look into XBMC but seeing as its for a mate I think I will be sticking to Windows Media Centre for now. It could be a reason for me to look into building my own Media Centre / Server setup in the future though Now that sounds interesting - I'll hold off buying anything for a short while and see how they pan out - cheers for the info.
