Budget Friendly Media pc

[Mensrea69]

Can any recommend a good configuration for a Media Pc?
I just received an Ultra Micro Fly case and 500watt Ultra power supply for Christmas. I've been wanting a Micro fly as long as they been out. These are the products I'm looking at:

-Biostar TA690G-AM2 Motherboard and the
Asus M2A-VM-HDMI

-I want to spend around 100 bucks on a AMD X2 Processor and around $75 on Memory (at least 2gb) I will have a 500GB sata HD coming soon.

And definitely a blu-ray drive:

-
Lite-On DH-401S-08 Blu-Ray Internal Playback Drive - 4x BD-ROM, 12x DVD±R SL Read, 8x DVD±R DL Read, 8x DVD±RW SL Read, Black
Item #: L12-1145
COMPARE
Lite-On DH-401S-08 Blu-Ray Internal Playback Drive - 4x BD-ROM, 12x DVD±R SL Read, 8x DVD±R DL Read, 8x DVD±RW SL Read, Black

Or the

Pioneer Blu-Ray DVD-ROM and 12X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model BDC-202BK - OEM

Or

Pioneer Blu-Ray Reader and 12X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model BDC-2202B - Retail


This is what I'll be hooking it up to:

42' Samsung HP-S 4253 Plasma
60GB PS3 via HDMI
Denon AVR-1508 receiver via HDMI and Optical Audio
Pro Cinema 600 Def Tech speaker system
it's not much but It's mine.

Thank you

[glogrono]

You'll probably wanna fill your MoBo with ram (4gb) especially since you're using the on-board video. Not sure if this system would play Blu rays smoothly. In comparisson, I have a P4 2.8ghz, 2gb ram, ATI All-in-wonder 2006 and I can't play BD smoothly.

[kpkelley]

What OS are you running? If you are running Vista you will need to offload the video decoding. You should offload the audio decoding.

I don't have a blu drive in my pc right now, but i'm pretty sure the mobo won't be hdcp compliant, thus requiring an add-on video card that is hdcp compliant. ATI have some new HD cards that are supposed to be pretty good for media content, but have struggled against the NVIDIA cards in gaming.

Do you have a tv tuner card already? Are you gonna get an all-in-one or seperate?

How are you connecting to the internet, wired or wireless?

You only have two PCI slots - wireless internet/sound card and TV tuner Card
PCI-Express X16 - video card
PCI-Express X1 - wireless internet/sound card


These add-ons should cost around a total of $500 or more. You can get cheaper but a sub $200-300 video card may struggle to process the decoding of blu-ray video.

One more note, beware of the size of many video cards as they may not fit in a media center pc.

Good Luck.

[Mensrea69]

I was planning on using Windows XP PRO. The biostar mobo is Hdcp. Its at tigerdirect.
http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en-us/...nt.php?S_ID=17

No, tv tuner card yet. But in the market. Plan to connect to the internet by straight wire.

Thanks for all the help.