So i'm thinking of building something for the lounge, i already have a Samsung 3.5" BluRay Drive so will need something to support that.

What i really need is a general idea of the cheapest bits i can buy, it will be for the usual stuff, surfing the web, watching Iplayer etc, and the main thing is Blu Ray movies so must be able to support HD playback with ease.

I was thinking what would cut it:

AMD Athlon X2 250+?
Motherboard: Chipset?
4GB DDR3
Separate GPU or Onboard?
Case + PSU? I have even considered just putting an MATX tower together as i can hide it behind something but it would be nice to have a Desktop/HTPC case.

Post your thoughts, link to bargains on Ebay etc.

If you get one of the latest gen graphics card it should support TrueHD HDMI passthrough, 3D, etc and will do hardware decoding, which means you won't need to go overboard on CPU, etc. Onboard will not cut it.

I was making this decision recently and opted for the HP MicroServer. My logic is that a media centre was going to cost me £120ish to build or buy (Popcorn, Revo etc) or for £165 (£120 server, £30 gfx card, £15 ram) I get all the upside of an HTPC with the added benefit of having the capacity for massively increasing storage.

Downside is that it doesn't fit under the TV.

Quote from: sexytw on August 25, 2011, 13:55:28 PM
I was making this decision recently and opted for the HP MicroServer. My logic is that a media centre was going to cost me £120ish to build or buy (Popcorn, Revo etc) or for £165 (£120 server, £30 gfx card, £15 ram) I get all the upside of an HTPC with the added benefit of having the capacity for massively increasing storage.

Downside is that it doesn't fit under the TV.

This is what i've been thinking to just buy a dual core pc and upgrade the gpu if needed, then just hide it behind the vase of fake plants. After speaking with Nige today i've got a better idea, i'm not going to go spending £100s on speakers and will probably just use a 2.1 speaker setup via a 3.5mm jack so i can save a bit of money on the gpu and possibly go for something with onboard video, rather than worrying if the gpu supports whatever encoding (i forget).

Just get an Nvidia Gfx card, they all do DXVA/CUDA.
Avoid ATI

I just ordered an Acer Revo 3700 - has HDMI & optical port by the looks of things, 500GB HD (will do for the moment but will get a NAS fairly soon), 2GB of RAM (which I'll be upgrading to 4) (cost £200 from ebuyer)

Intend to install ubuntu + XBMC - will likely get it to load XBMC at startup but am not going for XBMC live as I also want to install emulators & the airmouse app

Will see what its like controlling with my iphone - if I'm loading XBMC at startup then I'll basically mostly be using directional buttons on the air mouse app (costs less than a quid so might as well) also an XBMC remote app - otherwise I'll get a windows media center remote.

Will also have a PS3 under my TV in the media centre so will likely use the PS3 controllers for emulators and ideally launch the emulators from XBMC....