What's a Good Spec for HTPC?

[reven]

make sure your motherboard has lots of PCI slots, 5 is a good number.

[jasjol]

Secondary storage is 2x250 gb external 100 mb ethernet ximeta disk enclosures running at 5400 rpm (limitation here is the network, not the disk).

renzema - have you had any problems configuring the network drive?
do you access it from different computers? do you use XP?


Also I must say that the MVP is really good - noise less - and you can have several in different rooms and the HTPC in another room.
Only drawback with MVP is that sometimes it will not respond to the remote - most of the times I restart the PC which makes it better - but MVP works fine most of the time.

[smeghead]

make sure your motherboard has lots of PCI slots, 5 is a good number.

Why? The only PCI slots I use are for TV cards - one at the moment

[reven]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:
Originally Posted by reven
make sure your motherboard has lots of PCI slots, 5 is a good number.



Why? The only PCI slots I use are for TV cards - one at the moment

i have 2 capture cards, a firewire card, and i am wanting to get another capture card, leaving me only one more free slot, they can easily fill up. and besides you never know what they are going to invent that you will want and need a new pci slot for (eg a Digital capture card )

[renzema]

renzema - have you had any problems configuring the network drive?
do you access it from different computers? do you use XP?

Running XP Pro. Nope - no problem configureing it. I use it for secondary storage though with Jeff's Video Archiver program. Right now it is setup to be a single large volume, and it is pretty cool. If I access a file that physically resides only on one disk, it doesn't even spin up the second drive.

Stability has been perfect over the lan. I have also used it over a wireless network, but I can't comment well on the stability because my apartment building has about 6 active access points and we have pretty bad overlap. That said, even with those problems, it works pretty well over the wireless. There is also a new driver out that is supposed to improve that.

It's no speed demon, but it works. Writing a 2.0 GB file takes around 4m15s. Not fast enough for real time editing, but certainly fast enough for playing back videos. And they are so quiet that you can't even tell that they are on.

Josh