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Throwing together a cheap media center PC
kanaesin
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm interested in putting together a media center PC on the cheap, something that can play movies and dvds, maybe some light gaming (mostly 2d, simple stuff; PS1-quality graphics tops). I'd appreciate it if it could decode H264, but not at too great an expense. I'm kinda thinking that buying a used desktop and putting the proper graphics card in there is the way to go, but I'm not quite parts-savvy enough to know just what will do the job. What are the minimum hardware specs I could get away with, in terms of CPU, RAM, graphics card, etc? Do I need a dual-core processor or can I get away with an old P4? How old a graphics card is too old? I'm probably gonna run XBMC or Boxee on there, and I'm familiar with Linux, so I'd prefer Nvidia cards, as I believe they better support hardware video decoding under linux.
Any advice?
Any advice?
kanaesin on
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Your biggest concern would be getting a card that supports VDPAU, which is what would be used to hadware decode H.264.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo#Table_of_PureVideo_.28HD.29_GPUs
Are those cards PCIe? (thus implying that i need PCIe slots on the mobo?)
Read this. It will answer just about ALL of your questions.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=18816470#post18816470