[lucv13]

Hi, just thought I'd drop in and say hello, have been checking out the forum and xbmc site for the last couple days and have decided to give it a go. Have been using MCE since it's release and for awhile I used MyMovies, which I did like. Stumbled onto xbmc over at the blu-ray.com forum and thought it looked great.

Will be retiring my Conroe e6600 this weekend and have just received my new parts, putting together the following

P8H67-M PRO/CSM
Core™ i5-2320
HyperX Genesis 8GB DDR3-1600MHz
Crucial M4-64GB SSD
Win 7 Home Premium 64

Will be using some existing parts Corsair 620w modular psu, whatever DVD drive I have (LG I think), still have a new 2tb drive I bought before the prices tripled will be using it for my tv seasons, a 1tb drive will have my ripped DVDs and a 400gb dr for music. Putting it all in my Nmedia HTPC-8000 case Anyways I don't have any questions at this time just wanted to say hello and let you know that I think you guys have a great informative forum...

[sab0fro]

Hey lucv13, welcome to the forums!

Your new build sounds pretty great but I wonder why you would "retire" your e6600 rig--I would guess that it has plenty of life left for a nice XBMC front-end. I have to assume there are other factors other than CPU power, such as energy savings.

Best of luck with your build and trying out XBMC.

[eskro]

welcome aboard lucv13!

[bluray]

P8H67-M PRO/CSM
Core™ i5-2320
HyperX Genesis 8GB DDR3-1600MHz
Crucial M4-64GB SSD
Win 7 Home Premium 64

It should be a powerful XBMC HTPC!

[lucv13]

Thanks for the welcome guys,

Hey lucv13, welcome to the forums!

Your new build sounds pretty great but I wonder why you would "retire" your e6600 rig--I would guess that it has plenty of life left for a nice XBMC front-end. I have to assume there are other factors other than CPU power, such as energy savings.

Best of luck with your build and trying out XBMC.

Actually you are right about the e6600, it does still have a enough power to handle XBMC and being a 65w cpu vs 95w for the i5 it's not the energy savings. I guess mostly it's just upgraditis, but I do expect that the 2320 will improve encoding times somewhat and although I generally don't game on the PC too often I do want to ensure that the power is there if and when a game comes along for the PC that is not available for the PS3.

I will however need to purchase a GPU if that happens, I may have to buy a video card anyways if I encounter the 24p issue that Sandy Bridge supposedly has. My HDTV is 60hz so maybe I won't notice that problem, it is supposed to be much more noticeable on 120hz monitors...

[bluray]

I will however need to purchase a GPU if that happens, I may have to buy a video card anyways if I encounter the 24p issue that Sandy Bridge supposedly has. My HDTV is 60hz so maybe I won't notice that problem, it is supposed to be much more noticeable on 120hz monitors...

If you install this silent GPU "HIS H657H1G Radeon HD 6570 1GB" in it, you'll not have to worry about 24p issue!

[lucv13]

If you install this silent GPU "HIS H657H1G Radeon HD 6570 1GB" in it, you'll not have to worry about 24p issue!

Thanks, I'll see how it goes. My current GPU is an HIS HD3850 IceQ so I don't have a problem with the brand, however I may go a little further up the food chain if I don't just reuse my current one which has 512mb DDR3 and is 256bit

[bluray]

Thanks, I'll see how it goes. My current GPU is an HIS HD3850 IceQ so I don't have a problem with the brand, however I may go a little further up the food chain if I don't just reuse my current one which has 512mb DDR3 and is 256bit

It is depend on what you want to do with your HTPC. For just regular HTPC usage, HD6570 or this $29 "HD6450" should be all you needs. It'll playback all BD files in full 1080P video with DTS-HD/TrueHD audio and supports 3D too. If you are planning to do gaming and bitstreaming with it, this "HIS H687FN1GD Radeon HD 6870" should do!

[eskro]

i own the XFX HD-645X-ZQH2 and i recommended for windows users!!!

[lucv13]

Merry Christmas

Well I'm happy to say that I put together the system Friday overnight without too many issues, fortunately there were no hardware conflicts only a couple of driver issues with the Asus disk. Once I managed to load the LAN drivers though, I just went to their website for the rest. Did a few updates loaded Avast and then came here for XBMC.

I downloaded the stable XBMC, Dharma I think it's called and everything was going fine. About halfway through loading my TV programs the IMDB and TVDB scrapers just stopped working, played around for a few hours trying to figure it out and was about to give up and just go with MCE when I saw the post for EDEN, so I say to my self - Self WTH let's give it a shot.

I uninstalled Dharma and loaded the beta. Eden swept through my drives and the scrapers worked flawlessly through about 4000 tv episodes. I decided to load the Icefilms addon and everything went smoothly.

I am quite pleased with the program and the HTPC is running like a dream.

Yea yea there's always a but, I loaded the Harmony addon and it also works well, I did manage to program a key to exit XBMC but I haven't been successful in finding a keyboard shortcut to program a key to launch it. I did program my Green Button on my Wireless Entertainment Keyboard to launch XBMC however I really don't want to have to take my keyboard with me back to the sofa all the time.

Now I have to clean the fishtank, oops wrong forum

[eskro]

loaded the Harmony addon??

[lucv13]

loaded the Harmony addon??

Sorry not the Harmony addon the Windows MCE remote addon - which works with the Harmony remote