My planned core hardware - look ok?

[randomfeelings]

Dell Inspiron 530

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor (2.4GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 8MB Cache)

Genuine Windows Vista (R) Home Premium (Left this bit in the post for comedy value) 

3GB Memory

640GB Hard Drive (plan to add more though)

10/100 onboard (for Internet)
10/100/1000 PCI (for LMCE network)

Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 (would I be wise to upgrade this, or should this be ok for the core as it will not do much work as a media director in my study?)

Quite an old ATI (I think) voice modem - just on the random chance I can get it to work as an FXO card - comments welcome!

Thanks!

[johanr]

I think you have to go deeper than that in your plans actually. Have a look in the wiki. The network card and motherboard is really critical.

 Evenmore the drivers of the network card, graphic card etc.
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hardware

when decided what components you are going to go for, check the wiki/forum again for those ones to see whether there has been reported issues with them or not. Also look at some of the common posters setups(in the forum)
The more time you spend on research the less time you have to troubleshoot eventual setup issues.
Good Luck!

Br
Johan

[ogodt]

I think you have to go deeper than that in your plans actually. Have a look in the wiki. The network card and motherboard is really critical.

 Evenmore the drivers of the network card, graphic card etc.
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hardware

when decided what components you are going to go for, check the wiki/forum again for those ones to see whether there has been reported issues with them or not. Also look at some of the common posters setups(in the forum)
The more time you spend on research the less time you have to troubleshoot eventual setup issues.
Good Luck!

I have to disagre to Johan, im building a smilar Core as yours an think it's okay (at least I believe in it), the CPU, ram and nic's look good and regarding the graphic and sound the MD is going to handle that.

So i wouldn't be afraid to use it.

Ole

[purps]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is a quad core really necessary? I built my core with an OEM AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2GHz processor, and it copes very well. It stays on 24/7, never seems to get too hot, and I run a number of diskless media directors off of it. Obviously it depends on what you intend on doing with your core, but I just thought I'd add my comments in case you waste your money on an overkill system.

Cheers.

[randomfeelings]

Thanks for your comments. The quad core wasn't actually much more expensive than the dual core, so I thought hey why not!

The graphics card had to go though; I don't think it had any onboard ram to speak of, and the setup video on first boot was stuttering. After gaining a slight (but not complete) improvement with an nvidia 7300 I had in a box of junk, I decided to go for broke and stick a 8600GT (512MB) in, which has fixed everything and runs perfectly.

That said, I've now added a Nova T500 TV card (PCI) and it doesn't boot, instead telling me that it can't open port 2 - "maybe my usb cable is bad"! Hmmm...