Rate my specs... before I buy! (2 Viewers)

[patrickza]

I just have to have a htpc with media portal. At the moment I'm using a laptop so I'm buying everything, how does this look?

ATX Midi Tower Chassis 300W PSU - Prescott Ready (who is prescott and why is he ready?

ATI Radeon RS482/RX480 (or a nVidia GeForce 6150 is that better/worse)

AMD Athlon64 3000+

1024MB DDR 400 (Dual Channel)

7200RPM Maxtor 250GB Calypso SATAII (it says quiet drive tech, hope it is)

Samsung Dual +/- DVD Writer

hauppage 150 pvr.

So what do you guys think?

Thanks,

Patrick

 

[Efros]

purely on the basis that i prefer nvidia i would go for the geforce chipset, which mobo are you thinking about and will it have tv out?

 

[patrickza]

Not too worried about tv out as I plan to watch on a 19inch lcd, and hopefully upgrade to a plasma display at some stage...

 

[Efros]

I would have a separate boot HD, You must have a 40 Gb lying around, then use the 250 Gb as a media drive. I have just got a 320 Gb drive and thats what I'm doing with that, anyone got any idea as to the optimum partition size when dealing with 1 Gb files?

 

[Marcusb]

for your media drive, just make the partition as big as possible. all this governs is how much you can record.
Another tweak (from the tips and tricks forum) is to make the cluster sizes as large as possible.
Small clusters are better for small files. Large clusters are better for large files.

 

[Efros]

Its not for recording its going to be on another machine from MP, purely for storage of ripped dvds etc. So NTFS or Fat32

 

[CHli]

NTFS because DVD ISO won't fit in the 4GB max file size of FAT32.

 

[patrickza]

Sorry to hijack my thread back :wink:

But any more comments on my hardware selection?!?

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

patrickza

Save up a little more money, and get the pvr500 and get the joy of recording\watching different programs and worth the price difference.
This should be a requirement of any hptc.

8)

 

[patrickza]

patrickza

Save up a little more money, and get the pvr500 and get the joy of recording\watching different programs and worth the price difference.
This should be a requirement of any hptc.

8)

Couldn't I save up later and get a second pvr150? I've heard people say this is possible...

thanks