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Users / Re: Looking at gear for MCE - Good/Bad?? (EDITED)
« on: May 19, 2009, 11:52:12 pm »
I'm planning on building a LMCE system for a good friend, so I've been looking at a lot of different hardware lately with cost/performance/longevity in mind. I'm fairly new to lmce but have been reading allot on the wiki and forums. Only certain thing I have to advise is that you can get a 1.5tb drive for only 30$ more then the 1tb drive you picked. With dvd's taking up 4-8gb and blurays at 30+gb, 1tb can get eaten up pretty quick; Of course you can transcode them to a more efficient codec for 3+ times the movie capacity without much visible quality loss, but it can be a pain. (haven't found a way to do this yet on 64 bit lmce, myself...)
For what it's worth considering my admitted linux newbie status- Here are the two motherboards that have caught my eye:
775 board 130$: Asus P5N7A-VM -Wiki here.
AM2 board 99$: Asus M3N78 PRO -Wiki here.
They both have adequate peripherals, onboard Gbit (1), good onboard video/hdmi, (requires driver update- but should support vdpau when it arrives?) 8 channel audio with spdiff or optical- and the most important precursor for me, they are both documented in the wiki and proven to work with 7.10 with some fiddling. -video drivers and Ethernet drivers on both. Seams like from what I've read this is about as PnP you can expect for resent common hardware before 8.10 comes out. (someone please correct if I'm wrong here- I've come to this conclusion by allot of poking around the wiki hardware section and cross-referencing tiger direct.) I'm on this same search myself. that is: PnP as possible, future vdpau compatible, HD/ui2 alpha capable, hdmi, 7.1 stereo, reasonable price)
Oddly my asus/core i7 system was completely PnP for amd64 core/hybrid dvd install- but my friend isn't looking to spend that much, and it's overkill for a lmce system; I built it for gaming.
For what it's worth considering my admitted linux newbie status- Here are the two motherboards that have caught my eye:
775 board 130$: Asus P5N7A-VM -Wiki here.
AM2 board 99$: Asus M3N78 PRO -Wiki here.
They both have adequate peripherals, onboard Gbit (1), good onboard video/hdmi, (requires driver update- but should support vdpau when it arrives?) 8 channel audio with spdiff or optical- and the most important precursor for me, they are both documented in the wiki and proven to work with 7.10 with some fiddling. -video drivers and Ethernet drivers on both. Seams like from what I've read this is about as PnP you can expect for resent common hardware before 8.10 comes out. (someone please correct if I'm wrong here- I've come to this conclusion by allot of poking around the wiki hardware section and cross-referencing tiger direct.) I'm on this same search myself. that is: PnP as possible, future vdpau compatible, HD/ui2 alpha capable, hdmi, 7.1 stereo, reasonable price)
Oddly my asus/core i7 system was completely PnP for amd64 core/hybrid dvd install- but my friend isn't looking to spend that much, and it's overkill for a lmce system; I built it for gaming.