Need help building a HTPC...

[EQTitan]

As the topic state I'm looking for a littel insight and build advice for a HTPC system.

The rig can be in a pc case (preferably one that can lay on it's side). It will be taking the place of my Tivo, and I'd also like to set it up to stream audio/video from it's hard drive, or my 2tb A/V server.

I'm an AMD/Nvidia-Fanboy but open to Intel/ATi products, I'm pretty much keeps all options open.

Budget - $500
Use - HTPC audio/video, recording, playback, and buring
Parts - None starting from scratch

 

[LOUISSSSS]

not much u can do for $500... maybe something with onboard video? g33 chipset i believe it is

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: EQTitan
Budget - $500
Use - HTPC audio/video, recording, playback, and buring
Parts - None starting from scratch

You don't need much of a system for any of that... except recording. What are you going to use for recording? Is it a TV tuner that has built-in encoding, or a cheap tuner and you're using the CPU? Are you going to be encoding DVDs? For that, a faster CPU is nice. Otherwise you can get by on a fairly low end system. Know that $500 is not going to get you too much horsepower.

dual core AMD chip $75
AMD 690G chipset motherboard $70 (look for one with the proper connections for your TV, the integrated video is good enough to decode 1080p streams)
2GB DDR2 $60 (just about any will do)
250GB HDD $70 (this Seagate is a choice single-platter drive)
DVD burner $30 (just about any will do)
HDTV tuner $90 (I'm not too sure on this since I've never used one)
nice HTPC case with good quality PSU $95 shipped

$490 before shipping (except case) and with no operating system or keyboard/mouse

 

[SlicedBread27]

Originally posted by: EQTitan
As the topic state I'm looking for a littel insight and build advice for a HTPC system.

The rig can be in a pc case (preferably one that can lay on it's side). It will be taking the place of my Tivo, and I'd also like to set it up to stream audio/video from it's hard drive, or my 2tb A/V server.

I'm an AMD/Nvidia-Fanboy but open to Intel/ATi products, I'm pretty much keeps all options open.

Budget - $500
Use - HTPC audio/video, recording, playback, and buring
Parts - None starting from scratch

You do know that AMD owns ATI, don't you?

 

[EQTitan]

Ok, assuming I already have the hard drives and at minimum 1gb of memory, can this be done?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: EQTitan
Ok, assuming I already have the hard drives and at minimum 1gb of memory, can this be done?

Here we go... :roll:
Zap posted a list for you.

 

[Slugbait]

Also considering the cost of the OS? And if going with nVidia, you'd probably want to buy PureVideo as well.