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Help me build my new Home Theater PC

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4wd:
4wd, after reading up on your board. I decided to go one up and push to the GigaByte GA-MA790GP-DS4H board. For the cost difference, I feel it might be worth it to further invest in a higher capability board. Now, the case is my next big obstacle to tackle along with CPU and RAM. The NIC on this board is integrated and will suite my purposes unless someone can tell me of another card which might yield some sort of performance increase.-Josh (November 03, 2008, 12:11 AM)
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Not my board :)  I have a GA-MA78G-DS3H - I wanted the extra SATA port and the 790 boards weren't out yet.

For RAM, I'd go with any of the 2GB 800MHz modules they list in the QVL.  I currently use a pair of Apacer 800MHz 2GB DDR2 sticks in mine and while they aren't the fastest they work with no problem.

For CPU, I'd go for the 9150e or 9350e I mentioned earlier, Quad core CPUs at only 65W.  Or get a 4850e X2 now and look to upgrade when the new Phenoms start appearing around January.

The only way you could get a performance increase over the internal Gigabit NIC is to go for one of Gigabyte's DQ6 series, (in Intel or AMD), which add what they call teaming.  Another way to say they gang the NIC ports to effectively double, (or quadruple if it has four ports), the bandwidth making it a fair bit more efficient.

Also, the remote control I am learning comes with the FusionHDTV Card. Does anyone have any input on another remote which might function better and provide support for both Windows MCE (Vista) and controlling the Fusion Card?
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If I had to choose a remote it would probably be along the lines of ATI's Remote Wonder or, (since you're going to use BeyondTV anyway), SnapStream's Firefly.

RF is always preferable to having to use line-of-sight infrared.  This means you can possibly shuffle music from other rooms depending on the range you get due to wall construction, etc.

For the case it comes down to one simple question to start with:
1) Display or no display?

If yes, VFD or the latest touch screen 7" LCDs?

Once you've worked out that, then you can work within the limits set by the case layout.

Josh:
I was looking at 4GB of ram for the system since the mobo supports up to 16GB. As for the remote, the firefly looks promising but I will check out the Remote Wonder.

When it comes to the case, the display really serves no purpose to me unless its maybe a small LED style (like on most DVD players). I dont need an LCD. CPU is another issue I am looking at. What will the new phenoms bring to the table performance-wise?

Also, a question I have been pondering, would it be best to run 64-bit or 32-bit? This will be a specialized PC and won't require any special applications besides snapstream and tversity. Thoughts?

ewemoa:
If I had to choose a remote it would probably be along the lines of ATI's Remote Wonder or, (since you're going to use BeyondTV anyway), SnapStream's Firefly.
-4wd (November 03, 2008, 06:19 AM)
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A bit of a tangent here -- does anyone have experience w/ EZ Commander?  I'm of the dying breed of trackball users and have been considering whether this remote might be decent.

f0dder:
Why 4 gigabyte RAM in the system? Seems a bit overkill for a home HTPC in my eyes.

Also, why raid-stripe? What's the I/O bandwidth needed if you want to capture HD content? Any reasonable disks today should be able to handle 65mbyte/sec sustained or so :)

I'd definitely go for an intel CPU, and if you want to do capturing/transcoding, a quadcore might not be a bad idea.

Josh:
4GB of ram because ram is a cheap component. I really so no need to NOT get that much in there. The raid stripe is something I WANT to do but not something I need to do. I want the extra disk performance as I intend to be able to record two shows at once in HD (h.264 if possible). Right now, my wife records multiple shows and the throughput is a must. I also want backup capability since the amount of disk activity used for a PVR will likely increase the chance of failure of one of the disks. Maybe I am just being paranoid, maybe I should just go with a Raid 0 approach. I dont know.

Why do you say Intel for the CPU?

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