Associate
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 466
My old media PC has finally had it and I need to upgrade. I'll be cannibalising the old machine and keeping the case (Antec Fusion), power supply and some of the drives.
But my big question is what processor/ micro ATX motherboard do I go for? I'm pretty out of date but I see that the combined CPU graphics thingies seem quite good these days - I'm aiming for very low power consumption and quietness (I want to leave it on all the time). It will be mainly used for (in descending order of frequency): watching live tv via tuners, recording tv, playing DVDs & bluray, streaming iPlayer, playing downloaded films in iTunes, serving up music.
So what do I do - budget a few hundred ideally (just need the processor, motherboard, probably new fan, might buy a SSD for the OS).
On a related note I've always used windows (currently 7) and its media centre which I'm not that blown away with. Was thinking of swapping to XBMC - is it any good? Should I go the whole hog and put XMBC on linux - which would rule out iTunes I guess?
But my big question is what processor/ micro ATX motherboard do I go for? I'm pretty out of date but I see that the combined CPU graphics thingies seem quite good these days - I'm aiming for very low power consumption and quietness (I want to leave it on all the time). It will be mainly used for (in descending order of frequency): watching live tv via tuners, recording tv, playing DVDs & bluray, streaming iPlayer, playing downloaded films in iTunes, serving up music.
So what do I do - budget a few hundred ideally (just need the processor, motherboard, probably new fan, might buy a SSD for the OS).
On a related note I've always used windows (currently 7) and its media centre which I'm not that blown away with. Was thinking of swapping to XBMC - is it any good? Should I go the whole hog and put XMBC on linux - which would rule out iTunes I guess?