Multimedia Project

Hi all,

I am looking to build a living room multimedia pc tthat will connect via HDMI to my lcd telly.

All I want it to do is store my music and some dvd's etc, act as a pvr for freeview digital tv, surf the net, and play my dvds, perhaps handle blu ray too, depending on my price.

I have looked into how to do this in terms of software but i have no idea what specs i would need for this. I know that I want at least £500 Hard drive, but can someone please let me know what else I need interms of performance (i.e. excluding fans, and power supply etc) i.e.

CPU;
GPU;
M/B;
RAM;

Thansk for any help in advance. I really want to do this and thank you for any help you can give me!

Will all depend on your budget and form factor, but graphics card wise this is what the HD 3450 was born for! Audio over HDMI as well. The perfect HD media card as long as you don't want to play games on it.

CPU wise with that card you wont need much as it will take all the decoding work I'm not 100% sure on this but you could probably get away with the Celeron Duel Core E1200 or one of the E2000 series, AMD wise the low power BE-2*** series could be good options as they will generate less heat and so less noise.

MB obviously depends on form factor ATX or µATX and also CPU choice

Finally RAM its cheap at the moment so get 4GB as long as your running a 64Bit OS.

You don't need much to power what you have described.

Blu ray is the obvious concern but the £50 offerings from ATi (HD3650) can do all this without really leaning on the CPU so you can afford to get a cheap CPU like the celeron dual core webby has mentioned.

Some like a nforce 630i motherboard found here would work very well. You wouldn't need a graphics card with this board for anything other than blu-ray and even then it might handle it. Certainly worth a try anyway :)

You will only need a bit of RAM, so 2GB will be fine
Something like this cheapish RAM

So with integrated graphics you could do it for around £100 for the cpu, ram and board. £150 with a decent graphics card for the job.

and a case

Tekheads.co.uk

It is a very nice case but I would go with this, just the black version
Antec Fusion

and this cooler
Scythe Mini Ninja

i gave my wife the choise lol and she chose that one

:)

i may have to try that cooler though