[Brinson]

I want to build a home theater PC, what I have is:

2 gb DDR ram
160gb + 80 gb IDE hard drives
A pretty nice case, forget the model. Black friday deal -last- black friday

What I need:

Motherboard
CPU
PSU

What I want to do is basically build a cheap pc to play DVDs and stream from places like hulu. Newegg has a semprom 3600 for $19.99, and a board for it for $28, meaning I could a build a computer for under $50.

Think I would regret this decision?

I'm also going to surf craigslist and ebay.

[CalcProgrammer1]

My computer I'm on now is a similar build:

AMD Sempron64 2600+ (socket 754) OC'd to 1.8GHz
2GB DDR (1) RAM
ATi Radeon X1600Pro AGP 512MB
IDE 80GB (primary, OS) and IDE 120GB (secondary, storage)
Windows Vista Business 32
ATi TV Wonder VE

It's a good enough PC for media. I couldn't get a 1080p rip I downloaded to play, at least not in Vista with VLC, but for DVD-resolution it works fine. It plays TV fine though the card is ancient and gets an awful picture. If you had Windows Vista Home Premium/Ultimate it could run Media Center just fine (mine did under Windows 7). It browses the Internet just fine.

In XP I could even play Oblivion at a fairly decent FPS, but Vista taxes the CPU too much and it lags, may set up a dual-boot system later.

As for PSU, I bought a cheap $13 one when I originally built this computer, worked fine with the nVidia GeForce4 MX 420 AGP I had in it at the time, but I put my better PSU in when I swapped the Radeon in.

I definitely think you'll benefit from a graphics card. Doesn't have to be a good gaming card, but usually even the cheapest dedicated boards are much better than integrated. Graphics cards, in addition to rendering 3d interfaces like Aero, Compiz, Media Center, etc, are capable of accelerating and smoothing video playback, so you'd probably benefit from adding one. Even like an old Radeon or a cheap 8400GS or something, see what interfaces (AGP, PCIe) the board supports and see what's available.

[Brinson]

I have a very old Radeon 9200 I was thinking of using. I will be running linux on it most of the time with a small dual boot for services like Vongo or Netflix on demand if I decide to use them which require windows media player.

[EricB]

yeah that's fine. try install linux mce on it first and let me know what it is like. I can't get screenshots or other stuff from it to see if it's user friendly

LinuxMCE


I found one

LinuxMCE 0704 Demo Video