SFF MCE Edition Help On Build Please!

[AshelyBanks]

I am looking to build a sff windows mce 2005 pc and am interested in the XPC SB83G5M but found a note on there website saying
<quote>
Note: The barebone XPC SB83G5M includes chassis, VFD-display, mainboard, CPU cooling system and power supply. For a fully configured Media Center System you need in addition: CPU, memory, storage drives, graphics and TV Tuner card (analog or DVB-T), keyboard, mouse, MCE compliant remote control and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Caution: graphics card and TV tuner have to be compliant with MCE 2005. (please see the compatibility link at the right side of this page)
</quote>

does this mean that on board graphiccs is not compatable with windows XP MCE 2005 I have purchased a VGA-TV adapted as it does not have tv out the reason behind this is that I want to use the PCI-E slot for a dual digital tuner as the only dual digital turner i can find is a pci-e unable to find a pci one.

any suggestions??? Please!! ive been looking around now for a solution for about 4 weeks and just wanna start building but want all functionality i.e
surrond sound
t.v out and vga connection for projector
dual digital tv
thats not too much to ask is it?

[Silent Shark]

As far as I'm aware, there shouldn't be any reason why the onboard graphics won't work with MCE. Providing it can display a video overlay (and if it can't, it's a waste of space), you should be fine. The warning sounds like a generic notice.

Btw, what/where is that dual digital tuner? I have a single DVB card at the moment (Compro T300), but I'm looking to build a MCE PC for the living room, and a dual tuner card would be ideal.

EDIT:: Upon closer inspection, it's difficult to tell what they mean. I'll look into it more, but I still think you'll be ok. It would seem stupid if they designed a SFF pc advertised as MCE ready, and then put incompatible hardware into it.

EDIT2:: It's not on the compatibility list on the MS website, but then again, neither are the last 3 cards I've used in my PC, so that doesn't neccessarily mean anything. It says it supports DX9, so it should be good enough. Maybe e-mail Shuttle to ask, or e-mail Intel. Also, I believe that the PCI Express slot is a graphics only slot, so you may be out of luck with dual tuners (unless you find a normal PCI version).

EDIT3:: Taken from the Intel site: "Intel GMA 900 graphics offers driver support for a variety of operating systems - Microsoft Windows* 2000, Windows* XP, Windows* XP Media Center Edition, Mandrake Linux*, Red Hat Linux*, SuSe Linux*, Red Flag Linux*, and IBM OS/2*." The asterisk refers to how they tested it (not important).

You look like you should be fine there.

[AshelyBanks]

Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT PCI-E Dual Digital Freeview TV Tuner for Media Center
Is the card i was looking at for around &#163;70 not sure if its compatable with mce2005 though.

I'm sure it will work on the O/S side but Is the MCE application fussy about graphics cards?
I havn't tried this vga-tv connector yet hope the quality is ok soon find out i guess.

thanks

for looking up the driver support

Ashley

[Silent Shark]

It shouldn't be fussy, I haven't heard of people with incompatible graphics cards.

When choosing a tv card, you want to look for BDA compatible drivers (should be an advertised feature of the card). If they are BDA, they should work with MCE.

If you have no luck with your dual tuner, I'd recommend the Compro Videomate DVB-T200 (I have the T300, which has an analog tuner as well, but you probably don't need that). It works well with MCE along with the nVidia PureVideo decoder.

[AshelyBanks]

Well I have taken the plunge over the weekend I ordered a st20g5 shuttle with athlon x2 4200 chip 2gb of ddr ram 3200 and a 300gb hdd I already have a decent DVD re-writter will get all this tuesday and will then order the dual tuner if all h/w works ok with MCE the VGA-TV adapter I have works well and I am very impressed with the quality but the st20g5 comes with a DVi connector which I shall connect straight to my projector and in the near future a HDTV the shuttle also supports upto 7.1 surrond sound so I shall find myself some nice speaker to use with this.