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« Last post by JavaJones on March 08, 2010, 07:34 PM »
Hard Drive is going to contribute minimally to power use (~10-20w when in use vs. ~80-120+ for CPU), so I'd go for a decently fast, but standard drive. 7200RPM should be fine. WD's Green Drive series I think do run at 7200, at least some (recent ones are variable, but should max out at 7200), but are slightly less performant than a standard drive due to power saving techniques. Still worth it for lower power and heat output though I think.
The CPU and graphics card are going to be the heart of performance *and* heat in your system, so those are what you should choose most carefully. Intel is generally the leader here in terms of performance-per-watt which should probably be your main criteria, followed closely by performance-per-dollar (where AMD will lead).
I don't know your budget, haven't read the rest of this thread, but personally I'd be inclined to go for the best performance with reasonable heat envelope and get an Intel Core i7 860. Reasonable price (less than $300, say $280 US), comparatively good (i.e. low) power consumption for the performance (95w), and great performance. That'll be your best price/performance ratio in the i7 series. The one caveat to this is the actual per-core clock is not super high, so single-threaded work loads won't be as fast as they might be with a CPU at a higher clock speed, with fewer cores. That being said an increasing number of HD video codec playback systems are becoming multithreaded, as are many other applications. If price or heat are a bigger issue, consider an i5 650 (3.2Ghz, 73W, $185) which also has the advantage of a higher per-core clock speed (but only 2 cores).
As I said I'd go for the i7 860. As codecs get more complicated, the decoding computational demand rises, even at equivalent resolution (e.g. 1080p), and CPU decoding is likely to come before GPU accelerated decoding for any new codecs (e.g. VP8, next-gen MPEG, etc.). Due to the increasing ubiquity of multiple cores, most future apps, especially computationally demanding ones, will be multithreaded.
As for the graphics card, surprisingly almost any modern (current generation) card, even a low-end one, will accelerate HD content decoding pretty well. I would get something fairly middle-of-the-road. I don't think it even matters too much ATI vs. Nvidia, though I'll say I generally like Nvidia's drivers better, and they seem to have a slight edge in industry support. ATI has historically had better *DVD* decoding, and may also have a slight lead in Blu-ray as a perhaps natural consequence (the lead was mostly in interlaced video decoding), but you'd have to read some current reviews on that for the latest info as I'm really unsure.
As for the audio card, your choice is fine I guess, but I don't think you need a dedicated card to just HDMI your digital sources out to separate decoding hardware, which is what I assume you're doing. A good video player, codec, and graphics card will give you everything you need, HDMI'd out to your system and decoded there with better signal to noise, etc. I have a fairly low-end graphics card in my media PC from a couple years back and it HDMIs audio out just fine.
For the media center, honestly I think the open source/free solutions are largely ahead of the commercial ones (of which I'm not even aware of any major ones). The available free options are pretty robust and impressive IMO. Lots of threads on DC about 'em.
- Oshyan
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