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Thread: first attempt at media center PC

  1. #1
    Sink or Swim
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    first attempt at media center PC

    in the midst of building my first attempt at a media centre pc,

    at the moment ive bought:

    celeron 2ghz sckt 478 and a motherboard for just over £25
    and i might have 512mb ram coming soon.

    i know most of the things i need, just need some reccomendations on what to get,

    the motherboard i think comes with onboard gfx, will that be ok for what i need?

    will 512mb ram be enough?

    thats pretty much it.

    and come someone also explain to me what "720p/480p" means?

    thanks

    Nick


    edit:
    also im off for the night, so i want lots of advice for tommorow morning for me to read
    Last edited by Nick Smith; 04-03-2007 at 01:26 AM.

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    radix lecti dave87's Avatar
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    720p/480p means 720/480 lines (downwards) on the signal.

    480p is standard def, 720p is the lower of the true high defs

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    The King of Vague Steve B's Avatar
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    LCD's differ from CRT's in that they refresh synchronously, not progressively. This means all pixels change at the same time, rather than a gun moving back and forth across the picture. Your standard LCD is a matrix of pixels, with a maximum resolution, commonly known as the native resolution being the number of pixels along the width and height of the panel. The three nouveau standards for TV, being 480, 720 and 1080, refer to the number of horizontal lines used to create the picture. i.e. 480 is 480 horizontal lines. Each option can be suffixed with one of the letters, p or i. "p" stands for progressive scanning, in that each frame is completely rendered before moving onto the next. "i" stands for interlaced scanning. This is where some of the principles of CRT image creation are recycled. Half the frame is rendered, followed by the second half of the frame being rendered, with a time delay of frame rate / 2. It is useful to note that theres no point in playing a 1080 line video on a 1280x1024 native resolution screen, as the screen is technically incapable of outputting 1080 line vide streams.

    So thats enough about video, now onto hardware.
    What exactly are you using your PC for?
    What kind of resolution will the onboard graphics be driving?
    If all your doing is playing standard definition avi files, then sure, the onboard graphics on my mATX board do me just fine, and thats driving a 1920x1200 panel. If i want to play a 1080 trailer from apple, its like watching a slideshow. The onboard graphics simply aren't capable of driving a half-decent frame-rate. Its certainly capable of handling standard-definition DVD, which does look nice with the large screen real-estate. The key thing i think is to analyse what you actually want the machine to do. For memory hogging tasks, personally, i dont think 512Mib of ram will be enough, especially when another 512 is less than 25 quid.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Steve B View Post
    LCD's differ from CRT's in that they refresh synchronously, not progressively. This means all pixels change at the same time, rather than a gun moving back and forth across the picture. Your standard LCD is a matrix of pixels, with a maximum resolution, commonly known as the native resolution being the number of pixels along the width and height of the panel. The three nouveau standards for TV, being 480, 720 and 1080, refer to the number of horizontal lines used to create the picture. i.e. 480 is 480 horizontal lines. Each option can be suffixed with one of the letters, p or i. "p" stands for progressive scanning, in that each frame is completely rendered before moving onto the next. "i" stands for interlaced scanning. This is where some of the principles of CRT image creation are recycled. Half the frame is rendered, followed by the second half of the frame being rendered, with a time delay of frame rate / 2. It is useful to note that theres no point in playing a 1080 line video on a 1280x1024 native resolution screen, as the screen is technically incapable of outputting 1080 line vide streams.

    So thats enough about video, now onto hardware.
    What exactly are you using your PC for?
    What kind of resolution will the onboard graphics be driving?
    If all your doing is playing standard definition avi files, then sure, the onboard graphics on my mATX board do me just fine, and thats driving a 1920x1200 panel. If i want to play a 1080 trailer from apple, its like watching a slideshow. The onboard graphics simply aren't capable of driving a half-decent frame-rate. Its certainly capable of handling standard-definition DVD, which does look nice with the large screen real-estate. The key thing i think is to analyse what you actually want the machine to do. For memory hogging tasks, personally, i dont think 512Mib of ram will be enough, especially when another 512 is less than 25 quid.
    thanks for that info, i think i understand most of it.

    edit (forgot to put what ill be using it for...): going to be using it to play DVDs, TV, maybe a bit of gaming too, like WoW and maybe some other online games.

    im going to be running it at a small-ish resolution first, then i may upgrade to a larger monitor, depending on the size of monitors that i can mount to my wall, i was thinking about something like this:

    http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=503582

    not that expensive, looks nice, and will be mountable on my wall.


    The onboard graphics will only a temporary means of running a monitor, i was thinking about getting something like a 7300gt/7600gs AGP.

    and is there any way of telling whether the mobo has a x4 or x8 agp port, or doesnt it matter?

    thanks

    Nick
    Last edited by Nick Smith; 04-03-2007 at 10:56 AM.

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