Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

I'm looking for something a bit smaller and not a pre-made unit.

I bought the Gigabyte 780G board and an AMD AM2 ATH64 X2 5200 processor so far. Just need to find a deal on RAM, a hard drive, and a case now.

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

I Dont talk about work anymore

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

I Dont talk about work anymore

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

That Board and Proc will work GREAT

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

I recently built myself a budget rig for work and its AWESOME. I used the mobo and proc in this build:

mobo has built-in HDMI and I think fancy sound but im just using ---- speakers.


http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache...ient=firefox-a

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

Seems like all the good mATX cases are expensive! Dammit. I just want one that's smallish and not hideous looking.

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

Build your own case out of acrylic :P

Onboard sound might not be the "highest quality", but niether are most of the sources. I've never had a complaint with the quality and my comp has an olllllddd 5.1 motherboard.

I thought of using an xbox 360 as a "media pc" but I read some reports of higher bitrate stuff not streaming so well. I'm not sure if this has been corrected or if it was just using wifi streaming and couldn't keep up with the bitrate, but I'll probably try it before building a media pc. Also there's a lot of formats that I'm not sure it'll play yet?

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

The 360 works ok as a media center extender, only because of the update a few months ago that enabled it to play Divx files. It can't play any HD formats without re-encoding them to something the 360 can handle which is more hassle than it's worth IMO. If all you have are Divx files though, it's perfect. I stream movies and TV shows to mine all the time from my desktop computer in the office.

I have always wanted an HTPC and this one will do everything I need and more. It's kinda funny that the fastest computer in the house will now be attached to the TV O0

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

I Dont talk about work anymore

Re: Building a Media Center PC
 

I know the new N draft and MIMO stuff is quite a bit faster, but you gotta remember that (at the moment) the xbox 360 only has a/b/g wifi. With some hd rips being 10-20mbps or more, wifi sometimes has a problem keeping up. Maybe they'll release something faster later, or it'll have to be wired up. I'll most likely just build a mediapc later down the road, just because of flexibility