Good setup for a desktop PC?

plowexvii

plowexvii

New Member
Hey Guys,

I'm planning on building a media pc, and was wondering what good specs would be on building it. Right now i'm guessing a sufficient amount of ram and hard drive space, along with a nice video card is nesessary, but how fast does the cpu really need to be? What other things should i consider while building this pc? Thanks!

Phillip
 
What exactly do you mean by a media PC? An HTPC (home theater pc)? If so you really don't need much of anything unless you're planning on using it as a DVR (like Tivo) in which case you'll need a decent DVR card with onboard encoder or a TV tuner card and a slightly better CPU for "soft" DVR encoding.
 
I was looking at just an HTPC then. What would be the min. settings, as far as components, for a pc rig for that kind of use? Thanks Yeti,

Phil
 
I like the Celeron D 2.4 GHz for its price and speed. For a video card pretty much anything will do unless you're planning on using it as a HTPC/gaming machine. TVs have much lower resolution than monitors so it doesn't really matter much. I have a cheap Radeon 9600 in mine and that's probably overkill. To give you an idea of exactly how little you can get by with - I use my old Dell as an HTPC in my bedroom - it's a P3 800 MHz, 384 MB SDRAM, Radeon 7000 - and it works with no problems (a little slow loading things at times).
 
I'm planning on building a media pc, and was wondering what good specs would be on building it. Right now i'm guessing a sufficient amount of ram and hard drive space, along with a nice video card is nesessary, but how fast does the cpu really need to be? What other things should I consider while building this pc? Thanks!
Click to expand...
Intent and budget?

I was looking at just an HTPC then. What would be the min. settings, as far as components, for a pc rig for that kind of use? Thanks Yeti,
Click to expand...
The depends on the budget, you can get anything from a mobile athlonxp to a dual opteron setup :)

Also depends on how futureproof you want it :) As for CeleronD 2.4 ... while thats plenty for a lot of things, if you want to use the HTPC for video encoding, that wont cut it :)
 
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