[morgazmo]

Hey peeps,

Just ordered the first half of my bits and was curious on your comments. So far I'm $500 down n I've got the following in the post:

Antec NSK2480B - Black Micro ATX Desktop Case with 80 PLUS Cer $134.35
Corsair 4GB kit (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz Unbuffered CL 8 DIMM Memory $88.39
ATHLON II X4 645 3100MHZ/95W/2MB $125.15
AM3, 880G, 4DDR3, PCIE, RAID, VGA, GBLAN, HDMI, SATA3, mATX, USB $117.61

Decent mATX case w/PSU, some good quality CL8 RAM, 4 core 3.1GHZ CPUs and a comfortable mATX motherboard that should suit me fine. Still looking for a good 1GB nVidia card, a dual tv-tuner (hauupauge come highly recommended) and a good remote control. Will be running ubuntu 10.10 and XBMC. Already have drives and wireless mouse/keyboards etc and will run a wired connection (suits my setup fine) without SSD (install on SATA?). So far I think I'm in the clear but I'm curious what the big guns think. Any recommendations? Cheers.

Morgz

[jbo87]

Why did you choose that CPU and 4GB of memory? Are you going to use it for general purpose or video encoding?

[morgazmo]

Just general purpose really. I'll try get tuners with hardware encoding and I have no interest in ripping really. Just didn't wanna buy stale technology.. Why, did I overkill?

[jbo87]

Sorry but I misquoted my question. So you want to use it as HTPC only? I think the X4 is overkill then. A Dual-Core + newer NVidia GFX will fit your needs too.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=94268

[DaGround]

Not overkilled with a good gf (560ti for example) if you want to use it for heavy gaming htpc its just awesome with the advanced launcher, i didnt touch the ps3 since then xD

[morgazmo]

I think I fit group 3, maybe 3.5+. I just want one box. Twin tuners, full HD, Blu-ray etc. Not interested in gaming. In fact, I wasn't sure if I was even aiming high enough. Either way, this should be a decent little HTPC somewhere down the line. I think of it as future proofing and I don't mind blowing the bucks providing it does the job. Any further advice for me?