My little box !

First I want to give a lot of thank to the team who made the media Portal, it was just what I need for my project, and it's free ...

I sold a Dreambox and some other stuff to buy This case

And I used some "old" hardware from my brother's PC (I bought upgraded stuff for him :roll: )

- 2.0 Ghz Northwood Celeron
- Sparkl/Nvidia Geforce2 TI (64mb)
- 2x256 dram 266mhz modules
- Sony DVD -+r/rw DRU 510 A

I bought:

- 120 Gbytes hard disk (Seagate)
- Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse
- Technisat Skystar 2 DVB-S
- Usb Wireless LAN module (to connect the PC to my ADSL Router)
- IR Remote Control for Windows Media Center and ehm... obviously the original operating system...

I assembled it all: in this barebone case the agp slot and the pci one are very closer and the warm is very high, so I added some fans and radiators to force the internal air cooling using old stuff.
The AC '97 audio is set to plug in a Dolby 5.1 amplifier (59 € at hard discount)

The windows media center is incompatible with all the hardware, beginning from the video card, I tried Meedio and it doesn't have support for the Skystar card. Finally I found the Media Portal and it is like a miracle, it supports the MCE IR remote control, the skystar and there is no problem with my old hardware.
The movies, in particular all my dvx ones runs very well and without problem using the Nvidia video decoder and actually I'm writing this post from my HTPC.

Total cost about 500 €, buying the stuff to replace what I plundered from my brother's PC on ebay, but It could be less buying the "old" hardware directly, I don't need too much power for it...

Thank you again to the MP team for such a great work !

[Smirnuff]

Hi again -

Sparkl/Nvidia Geforce2 TI (64mb)

If you were to ask what people would recommend you upgrade first I'd say your graphics card, a nice FX5200 can be had real cheap, with passive cooling and they support every video feature that MP currently offers - and is likely to until Longhorn makes it on the scene.

Lol, hope your brother doesn't get upset and steal it from you .

Cheers,
Smirnoff.

You're right, at first I had a Nvidia-something with 256 Mb here on my own PC and decided to put it on the HTPC, but I gave it to my brother and took a Radeon 9800 for me. The PC under the TV is intended only for watching TV and movies and that card works great with Mediaportal :wink: . My brother (which is very younger than me) now has a celeron 2.6 D prescott and 400Mhz memory modules + the Nvidia 256 mb card and it's happy...

Maybe using the same brand Nvidia decoder helps the card to run fine...

[Autoper]

Youre case is looking real good