Building A Custom Desktop

[prerich]

Originally Posted by BohemianGraham

Hello boys. Any of you bother to grab a TV Tuner/PVR of some sorts? I know it's a lower end card, because it doesn't do HD, but the Hauppague 1250 is a beast, at leas on my desktop. I've had it record entire days worth of programming on TCM, and it just keeps on chugging. It's also not very taxing on my system. I'm impressed, because I've read a lot of reviews where people said that Hauppague cards are junk.

Also, anyone want to suggest a very modest OC level for my laptop's graphics card? The new one I bought has an AMD Radeon HD 6470 M, with 512MB GDDR3. It clocks at 900MHz for mem, and 800Mhz for core. It's only a 64-bit bus, and where it is only a week old, I want to get a little extra oomph, but not too much. Trixx Sapphire allows me to OC it. I'm not going to be using this for a lot of gaming (only for really low level stuff like The Sims 3 if I get bored and I'm not home near my desktop.). It's more for word processing, web surfing, watching the odd film (sometimes via HDMI as it does have a BD Drive), and for messing around in Photoshop.

My model isn't one of the ones with switchable graphics either, as custom build Sonys are almost as expensive as MacBook Pros up here, and I just wanted to replace my 4 year old PoS Compaq with something a bit sturdy. I just went middle of the road with the Sony, as it was on clearance sale for 850, because it's the June 2011 model. I know my card is relatively low end for gaming, but for the other stuff I want to do, it's more than fine. Certainly better than onboard Intel though, which my last few laptops have had.

I'm using the HDHR3 Prime from Silicondust. This is the best tuner that I've ever used. I just built 2 more HTPC's to go into my bedroom and the guest room. No more cable boxes! The HDHR3 Prime plugs directly into my router and my WMC equiped PC's can pick it up from there. My PC's are all hardwired for the fastes connection available. It's been working great!