my future HTPC, one of those noob threads (1 Viewer)

[rien-ne-va-plus]

ok, so if i didn't misunderstand this forum i can post my stupid questions here and nobody will lough...

so, im planning a HTPC. i want to use an athlon 2200+ thorton and some kingston value ram and a mediacenter 300i tv card. as HDD i want to use a samsung 120 GB 5400rpm

now i dont know what mainboard to use...it has to support the athlon mobile, should have 4 pci (but well, 3 are enough if the board s good) agp for sure...

than there is a feature which depends. is it possibel to run windows XP wihtout internal HDD? so i could only use a usb HDD? then the board would have to support that...

what board do you recommend? what CPU cooler? (has only 5,5cm height for the cpu cooler left) if boot up from external HDD is possible, which HDD case? well, thx for any answers

 

[Frodo]

Why not use an hauppauge PVR card like the 150MCE, 250, 350 or USB2?
they are probably one of the few cards which are supported by almost all mediacenter applications including MP

Frodo

 

[rien-ne-va-plus]

the card has to be low porfile and not that expensive...so that was may problem with the PVRs

 

[Anonymous]

As for the motherboard, there are several good ones out there. Stability and quality is the key here, if I were you I'd go for an Asus or Abit. What form factor did you have in mind? Micro-atx?

 

[rien-ne-va-plus]

yes, mthat brings me to my next problem:

in my case perfectly fits a miocro-atx board 24,5*24,5 cm an one 5,25" slot for dvd and HDD above of each other, but there is no space for a power supply...so i thought: its better to use an external HDD than an external power supply, but all that i got to know is that it doesnt really work to exclusevly use an external hdd...well thats only to give the backround, what mainboard do you recommend? i already thought about the asus a7v400-mx...

what would be alternatives?

 

[Frodo]

the new pvr 150mce is not very expensive
i believe $60 or something and it sure makes the my tv module
soooo much better
frodo

 

[Anonymous]

That asus board seems like a good choice, don't know much about external hard drives though..if the mainboard supports it, it's most likely to work perfectly. However, the board you are talking about looks a bit old...

Will look more into it later. External storage is an interesting chapter, since the new usb/firefire drives are actually quite pretty nowadays so you don't have to hide them behind the tv set anymore :wink:

 

[rien-ne-va-plus]

because i was favouerizing the board a long time i wrote to ASUS and they told me it doesnt support usb booting

the PVR 150 is quite expensive in germany, about 80 euros, 100 dollars so for that rice i get a dualtuner mediacenter 300i...

i really dunno about tv-card, but mainboard is every help appreciated

 

[Anonymous]

Does the mediacenter 300i have hardware mpeg-2 encoding?

 

[rien-ne-va-plus]

no, it has a dual analog and dvb-t tuner, the analog without mpeg2, the digital, well u know it comes in mpeg2