what's going on?

[Mich the Tester]

I don't live in Swindon.

And you are a tw@t.

You know we all love you really

[chef]

When chef's £1K PC goes pop, that's £1K down the drain.

sigh, DP, it's 1k in upgrades, do keep up, total value around 1.5-2k i'd guesstimate

more people have sky+ hd as most people dont want to/cant build a good quality HTPC, the pre-built ones in the shops are generally cr@p and noisy, plus most people arent techy geeks that like spendig most of their time on the net, playing pc games AND appreciate good quality sound and vision. And it's far easier to say yes thanks to sky than to think of building a pc and someone like my parents dont want all the extra features that i've listed previously, they just want a tv they can record stuff.

The windows media center guide, I believe, is better than the sky guide. For starters you can continue watching the channel you are currently watching while you switch to the tv guide as it displays it in the background, the series link functionality is there the same as sky and as I've built the thing I know it has good quality products in it rather than relying on the tatt that sky+ ships out

[TheFaQQer]

Or £50 for a new PSU and he gets to keep his recordings.

Amazing - next time my hard drive fails, I'll buy a new PSU and that will save the day. Thanks for the tip

[doodab]

Amazing - next time my hard drive fails, I'll buy a new PSU and that will save the day. Thanks for the tip

Oh please don't be silly. DP was suggesting that a component failure in a PC involves bricking the whole machine, which is clearly not the case, and I was pointing that out.

It is however the case for a sky box. I am on my sixth. Three of them lasted less than a week, one actually lasted less than 6 hours. Every time it dies you get a new sky box and lose all your recordings, unless you can be arsed to open it and replace or recap the power supply (which is by far the most common problem with them)

[chef]

[norrahe]

sigh, DP, it's 1k in upgrades, do keep up, total value around 1.5-2k i'd guesstimate

Add another 1.5k onto that and you might have hit the ball park. Especially if you are going to buy decent motherboard, tv, sound, video and graphics cards.

[Churchill]

Add another 1.5k onto that and you might have hit the ball park. Especially if you are going to buy decent motherboard, tv, sound, video and graphics cards.

His processor of choice has an on-chip graphics adapter. FFS, he won't need 1GB of video ram.

[chef]

Add another 1.5k onto that and you might have hit the ball park. Especially if you are going to buy decent motherboard, tv, sound, video and graphics cards.

- the cpu has the latest technology from intel with full hd graphics on the processor, released jan 1st 2010
- the motherboard has usb3 ports and is after a lot of research is generally rated the best matx motherboard currently available, matx because i dont want a huge case so atx is out.
- tv is the hauppage dual tuner x 2 i.e 4 tv channels available to record/watch/stream to slingbox
- agreed graphics and sound could be seperated out to seperate cards if I was playing hard core gaming but im not a hard core gamer, as long as it displays hd quality sound and graphics that is more than sufficient for my needs, plus adding the high end graphics adds heat and noise which isnt what i want from a htpc, fast and silent were the key parts

just curious, what would you change of my setup (apart from the case)? I'm open to any idea changes..

how on earth can you spend 3.5k on a home built htpc? the 2k was simply the htpc part, excluding receiver and speakers

[doodab]

You can put together a pretty decent HTPC for a grand or so, including TV tuner cards. You don't need top-end graphics or CPUs.

[chef]

i've just done some quick calc's and to buy my HTPC setup on amazon comes to around £1850, im sure I can shop around and get it cheaper and I already have some of the parts

receiver is £750 new today (mine is 2 years old)
speakers £1800 new today (mine are 2 years old)
lcd tv £760 new today (mine is 2 years old)