Building my own home theater pc running linux and need some help?
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Answer:
just built one...
a single thread processor should be fine, if your just going to use it for time shifting, recording and watching video and music, a low end p4 should do the trick, but when you record one show an watch another it might max a 2.4g processor (depending on your tuner...suggest one that has a chip/hardware mpeg-2 decoding so that your p4 doesn't have to do it with software, like a pvr 150, 250 or 1600 all have hardware encoding/decoding). Also be careful which tuner you buy some are NOT compatible with linux (usually anything made for MCE) Newegg and tigerdirect have Pent. D's (which are a little hot and loud) for like 65.00 or an AMD 2x36xx or 38xx for about the same price (cooler and quieter, faster) but this might be a little bit of an over kill in terms of processing power.
I would go with at least 512mb (or you might come to find that 256 is the bottleneck of your system.
my build is total overkill, but I need it to game and do a bunch of other stuff...
for a video card you should be able to get a way with a 6600 on the low end. All you really need from the card is a digital output (DVI = easily converted to HDMI) plus if you ever want to put high end video (i.e. blue ray or HD dvd) your card will have to be HDCP compliant or else you'll only get analog output to your devices.
also keep in mind that recording HD programing can be 4-8g per hour so your 500g drive will only hold 60 to 120 hours of programs...is that enough?
my overkill build...
asus, p5n-e sli
e6400 (1600fsb @3.2ghz)
1g ddr2 800
2x pvr 1600 (dual tuner)
red hat (linux)
7600 gt oc
3x 500g SATA
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