<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 5/22/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">William Munson</b> <<a href="mailto:william_munson@bellsouth.net">william_munson@bellsouth.net</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Matthew McClement wrote:<br>> John Drescher wrote:<br>><br>>>> What I am looking for is a great package deal on board/processor/memory<br>>>> that is going to easily handle the above. I would also consider a bare
<br>>>> bones system with case and supply. In the second case I would simply<br>>>> retire the old system to be used as my desktop system. What great deals<br>>>> are out there right now?<br>>>>
<br>>>><br>>> For CPUs the $69 AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane 1.9GHz 2 x 512KB L2<br>>> Cache Socket AM2 Processor is a great deal.<br>>><br>><br>> I'd be inclined to pay the little extra for the 4200+, as it gives you a
<br>> bit more wiggle room when playing the higher bitrate MPEG2 streams,<br>> especially if you have transcodes happening in the background, and the<br>> TDP is the same as the 3600+.<br>><br>> Combine that with Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3(a near perfect ATX HTPC
<br>> motherboard that's only let down by the fact that it's missing SPDIF on<br>> the rear panel I/O) and some value RAM(667 or better is fine, 2x512MB<br>> sticks) and you have a nice, fairly cheap, base system. Unless your
<br>> current power supply is very underpowered(under 200W) it should work.<br>><br>> Matt<br>><br><br>Sounds like a good possibility. I already have a SPDIF from the existing<br>setup so as long as the header is there I should be able to make it
<br>work. Power supply is a stout 450 watt so thats not an issue either. Any<br>other systems that are good? How about Pentium 4 dual core systems?<br><br>Bill<br></blockquote></div><br><br>I'm really liking my current setup - Core 2 Duo e4300 overclocked to 3 ghz - from
1.8ghz (took 5 min to accomplish this on the stock heatsink and with no voltage increases so no extra power usage). I bought an openbox P5W DH deluxe mobo from newegg and got a good 2 gig ram deal... upgrade path is available when the july 22nd price drops happen on the intel q6600 quad core and move the e4300 to my personal system. The P5W is a rediculous mobo with eveyrthing I could possibly want on it 6 sata II connections (which are all used), dual gigabit nics, firewire, 3 pci slots, 2 pci-e x1, pci-e x16 etc... Worth the cost to me anyway. If I didn't have the need for 3 pci card slots I may have gone with a cheaper mobo.. Wish the HDHR was available when I built my original system.
<br><br>Total cost: three hundred or so.<br><br>As to performance - I can play back highly compressed 1080p x264 content without frames dropping or sound issues and hddvd/bluray works fine and looks rediculous<br><br>But unless you need the x264 decompression stuff the amd dual core above should be fine
<br>