Recomendation for cheap system

[epsolon77]

I am getting enough money back from taxes to pay down a bunch of bills and hopefully buy a LinuxMCE setup for my house.  I will currently only be using it as a Multimedia system, though I will eventually be adding the phone component, security component and home automation to it.  

I currently have two rooms with TV's and will likely be adding two more rooms in the future, assuming I can get them wired (More a question of time then ability).

I would like to know what the cheapest media director setup would be.  Would an Atom330 processor be enough to power a media director?  I am going to have an off Core NAS storage system that will have uber amounts of storage space, and I am looking at having a Core with 2 Coax inputs and a Pentium Dual core which should suffice.  The other issue I have is that none of my current TV's are HD, so I would need either an S-Video output or Composite output.  We will move to HDMI Tv's in the future, but not right now.  Any input would be great.  Thank you all for a wonderful system for me to drool over!

[theteju]

for good sound, I would recommand to buy logitech Z 5500 speaker system. they are cool.
I  got my uirt controlling volume as well !!!!

[purps]

In my experience, buying MDs that are suitable for both SD and HD really limits you. I used to have all SD TVs in my house, so I built one MD for my lounge with a cheap and cheerful MSI mobo, AMD single core, 1 gig of RAM and a half-decent nvidia card, 7xxx if I remember correctly (obviously make sure it has an S-video output).

Then, when I was ready to upgrade to a HD tele for my lounge, I bought an atom 330 mini-ITX mobo (with nvidea graphics of course) with HDMI output at the same time, with the idea of moving my old MD to another room that still had an SD tele. I plan to go through my entire house in this fashion, recycling old MDs wherever possible. And when I reach a point where all the TVs in my house are all HD (some time away methinks!), I'll just sell the old MDs.

You might also want to consider using old laptops as MDs for your SD TVs, they can be picked up pretty cheap on ebay.

You didn't ask about the core - I assume you're sorted on that front?

[chrisbirkinshaw]

Would an Atom330 processor be enough to power a media director?  

Yes, if you get a board with an ION chipset. The ION takes care of HD (up to 1080p) decoding while my Atom CPU sits at 90% idle.

For HTPC nowadays I think ION and Atom is the only sensible option. To try and decode 1080p with CPU alone is expensive, hot, and noisey.

[macaroni]

The other consideration is flash. If you are going to use hulu the atom will not cut it. You will need a core 2 duo at least.

[macaroni]

This is an example setup that I was looking at for hybrid or MD.

Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811108196

Hard drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145287

Keyboard and mouse
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823126041

Ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134117

Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500035

CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115036

DVD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136144

This setup is about $600.