1st off any good sites for more info?

what i want from it at the mo, internet radio, mame?,
freeview and analouge ( the second so i can record off my cable box )
allready have a hauppauge 1300 card in my every day pc, so will rob that.

4 hdds probably all 120gbs , as i have a few allready

1. operating sytem ( tho no idea what to go for ? )
2. mp3s.
3. mame
4. recordings off tv

needs to have a digital audio out for my amp and svhs or scart for TV.


now i hope ive got the right specs for mother board and chip, because i want it to in the future to run a hd player and blue ray player HD sat card, which would mean a hdmi graphix card?

motherboard asus P5K-E http://www.ebuyer.com/product/129126
processor Intel Core2Duo E4500 http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130486

looking for 2 x1 gb ram, what fits this board?
a graphics card with a svhs output?
A case to stick it all in, anygood? http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...MEWA:IT&ih=005

powersupply, something quite?


err im i going along the right line?

 

Your spec seems good, I bought a fairly low end processor for mine and soon discovered when you run downloaded 1080P films at full res the processor shat itself and I dropped frames. The E4500 will be fine.

I would go for huge amounts of disk space, I have 500 gig and its filling fast, once you start with HD stuff the average film is 10 gig with some at 30 gig!!

 

Oh I forgot to say, go for Vista as you can then use a remote controll and its just geared up for a media centre better.

 

plan on using my smaller drives first, as not even sure ill go HD anytime soon, still running a rear projection screen here!

 

One other thing

you dont need an hdmi graphics card, DVI to hdmi cables are the best bet

 

right will these work well together?

ASUS P5K-VM AiLifestyle Socket 775 iG33 onboard VGA 8 channel Audio mATX motherboard
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132097

OCZ 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 CL 4-4-4-15 PLATINUM XTC
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/116755

Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.20GHz Socket 775 800FSB 2MB Cache
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130486

Antec Black Fusion V2 MATX MediaCenter Case
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/129280

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1300 ( all ready have one )
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/107008

3 X 120GB HDD ( ata/ide ? ) (already got, a few years old now) How do you connect 3 or more hdds up?

Lastly a card to give me a phono or svhs output to my TV????

 

I have that case Fil its very nice make sure you dont get a huge CPU cooling fan though as there isnt much room in there

How many IDE slots are there on that board? mine only had one as SATA is the new format really, you cannot piggy back three harddisk only two via IDE. plus you will need a DVD rom unless you want a SATA one of those of course


I would just use SVideo output to your tv unless the TV dont support it of course

 

Just as Chop said you need bigger hard drives...

I have 2 320gb drives and one is full of just HD movies from 5gb to nigh on 40gb per film....

my main MCE hard drive just for recording tv is 320gb and that is roughly 3/4's full with shit i still havent watched yet


Also how big is your mame folder? as mine is 70+gb then with the other emulators it comes to well over 150gb...

Why not buy one of them external hd's from DABS or whoever the 500gb for 70odd quid?

Graphics card i can recommend the sapphire ati radeon 512mb ddr3 pci-e card from dabs @Ł90 quidish it has 2 dvi outputs (i use dvi to hdmi for my hd tv in my bedroom) as well as a svhs output too
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx...66360000,50758

It works fantasticly well with all the games i've thrown at it including crysis,gears of war,call of duty 4 and sega rally..

Mart

 

IDE??? SATA ??? errr youve lost me

 

Newer hard drives use SATA connections and seem quicker than the older IDE...

If you have spare pci slots you can get pic cards just for SATA

 

i have the 120gb hdds allready ( so will use them at 1st to get it all up and running etc, and no plans of HD yet, need a new tv 1st!

the mame, only got the basics 10gbs worth, asked in another thread on here about where to buy the full dvds of it from , think you sent me the link before?

 

Just had a quick look that board has 4 SATA connections

 

ahh the borad i want says, Storage Ports Configuration 1 x ATA, 4 x SATA

so does that mean 1 older ide drive and or 4 newer sata ones?

 

Oh if you don't have a hd tv don't worry so much now then
on vista media centre a film is around 3-4gb and an episode of Csi Las Vegas is about 1gb in size...

I probably did the link for the full disks is
http://www.retro-burner.co.uk/

 

they wont work with your old IDE hard disks though, check how many IDE slots its has?

 

Yeah i would of thought so but with the 1 IDE i think with the right ribbon/cable you can have 2 running 1 master and 1 slave

 

what fan you got on the chip in the case then?

 

The one I bought Fil was to big in the end but i trimmed it down I wanted a quiet fan which I didnt realise was huge!!

You need a fan which is no higher than 5 inches, i would say 4.5 to be sure

 

that 4.5 inches is from the MB up so needs to include the cpu and sink also

 

cheers, probably best to wiat until its all together and have a messure up?

What the VFD display like on the front, seems there a bit crap, from reading reviews on the net, can you set it up to read anything usefull?

 

It tells you some good info but ive not managed to get mine to display film info, play time etc. Its a bit of a gimick but its quite cool, shows you PC performance states and even the news headlines if you want it to

yeah I would wait until the PC is togther before getting the fan

 

hmm same case without the display, knob and 50watts less psu

half the price!

http://www.lambda-tek.com/components...l1_uid=0&go=go

 

lamb chops, what graphics card you got in there? can you still use both pci slots, if you have 2?