Stephen Beattie

Following on from my last post, I’ve ditched the idea of building a new mini-htpc for the time being.   Nothing quite beats building a PC from scratch – it appeals to the Lego man in me – but using my existing Antec Fusion mATX media centre case and PSU saves me a considerable amount of money.  I’d love to build something small and sexy in the future but for now I just need a working system for as little outlay as possible.

I am still sticking with the AMD 780G platform, however.  The desktop (mATX) versions of these boards have recently dropped dramatically in price.  The energy efficient 45W CPUs have gone up slightly since my last post but overall a 780G system is getting cheaper.

Here’s what I’ve just bought for £125 at eBuyer:

• Motherboard: PowerColor RS780G
  - bumpytrails has a nice unboxing gallery of this board
  
• RAM: Kingston 2GB DDR2 800MHz CL5 1.8V
  - Single stick. I know they work better in pairs but I’m on a budget and want to expand later – the PowerColor only has 2 RAM slots!
• CPU: Athlon64X2 4850e 2.5Ghz @45W
  - Obviously not as power efficient as an Atom but should have no problem transcoding video on the fly.
• Extras: Plexus SATA TO IDE Dongle
  -  The PowerColor motherboard only has one IDE connection so to make use of my existing drive I need to use this adapter.  I’m waiting for SATA SSDs to come down in price so this is a temporary measure for the system drive.

I think this is £125 well spent.  When the bits arrive and I plug it all together I should be good for 1080p playback and reasonably quick video encoding.  This will be a huge step up from the 1.4GHz 512Mb RAM Athlon XP sytem currently squatting in my lounge.  It’s going to be more powerful than the Eeebox B208 system I’ve somehow convinced myself I NEED too (although I can’t fix this one to the back of a TV in quite the same way!) .

Software-wise, I’m going to install Windows 7 and try that version of Media Center out.  I’ve been looking for a decent media center application and previously tried MythTV (via Mythbuntu).  Ugh! – I never got it working and wasted days trying to get the RadioTimes TV listing feeds integrated.  Until Boxee has TV tuner support, I’ll stick with Redmond thanks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 8:06 am and is filed under Computers, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.