Building a media-centre PC

[Witchfinder]

I've been thinking of putting a media-centre PC in my living room to connect up to the TV. I'm thinking of going for a dual core Athlon, 2GB RAM, 320 GB Hard disk, packed into the Antec Fusion mediacentre case. The motherboard will probably be the Abit AN-M2HD which has decent enough on-board video, DVI and HDMI outputs, 7.1 outputs and PCI-E slots. I know it fits the case because a colleague's friend has done it.

I was thinking of putting a HD-DVD ROM drive into the box, but I can't seem to find any at all! Everything seems to be Blu Ray. Is this really the only choice? I'd expected Sony to lose the format war as usual, but HD drives are nowhere to be found.

Also, I could do with a recommendation for a dual DVB card. I am looking at the Compro Videomate E700 - seems to be quite feature rich, but I've never heard of them.

[Witchfinder]

clemens said:

Btw....I'm seriously interested in that Abit mobo you mentioned. It looks fantastic, especially with the built in HDMI and HTCP encryption. This is the biggest problem I have since I can't connect up an HD from my DVI connector. I just get a messed up picture!

From all accounts, it's a cracking board. I don't think I'd even use the HDMI port though - my 50" Panny plasma (1080i) has a wierd native resolution, so I'd probably be best just setting it up with a DVI or VGA cable at the native resolution.

Edited by Witchfinder on Thursday 18th October 12:12

[Witchfinder]

Dredging up an old thread I know! I've decided on the spec I'm going to go for:

Antec Fusion Silver MediaCentre MicroATX Case with 430W PSU mATX - £115.09
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64Bit 1Pk OEM (DVD) - £65.79
Abit AN-M2HD, NF630a, S AM2, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 800, SATA II, SATA RAID, uATX, HDMI, HDCP - £50.44
Compro VideoMate E700 PCI-E Dual DVBT Tv Card - £56.27
AMD AM2 Athlon 64 4400+ Windsor Core, Dual Core 2.3GHz, 2x 512KB Cache, Energy Eff'' Retail - £51.92
400 GB Western Digital WD4000AAJS Caviar SE, SATA II, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, 8.9 ms - £53.10
Samsung SH-S203N/BEBN 20x DVD±R, 12x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, SATA,Lightscribe, Black, OEM inc Nero - £17.41
2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12 - £34.83

Unfortunately this puts me about £50 over budget, and I've not even added a keyboard/controller or wireless network card to that yet. Anyone got any suggestions for alternative products? My first though is to replace the Antec Fusion with something cheaper, but it looks so nice, and is apparently a very quiet case.