Home intertainment center

Home entertainment center

Ok guys, I'm planning on building a home network including a pc based entertainment center and I'd like to get a little feedback on some Ideas I have.
You see I have this 55" tv that has ....vga connector, fire wire (i-link) and all of the normal hi end connections. I've wired my house for 10/100 ethernet all ready. I want to build a new P4 to run the tv (play movies, games, display pictures, and store most of the household info) and be linked to the other pc's.

What I thinking is to use another TH711-R, cause they dropped way down in price, and one of the 133fsb chips and overclocked pc800 or even some pc1066. My main interest here is to have great dvd playback.

And the question is..........................................

What I'm not sure about is were to throw the most money at....the cpu or a vidieo card. I know that the vidieo card is important in vidieo animation But what about dvd playback?

entertainment is always spelled wrong for some reason sorry man I have no advice I am a jerk

First you'll need one of these. PM Maxvla, he'll tell you about installation and connections, and why you should look into it. Also, why not an XP+ system? That'd give enough money for the video card. For a video card, I'd go with a Gigabyte Radeon 8500LE Refurb from Newegg.

well then... nice problem you have

i need a little more clarification on the system's purpose. is this going to be a gaming machine as well as a dvd player?

if its just a dvd player you could set it up with a measley 400-500mhz amd k6-2 and slap one of those dvd decoder cards like the penguin showed you. i have that particular card myself. its immensely better than any software decoder. all said and done you could build this system for 100-175 depending on where you get your parts.

now if this is going to be a gaming machine too, just build it up like you would if you were going to have the biggest baddest lan rig this side of the mississippi. then plug in the decoder card and you'd be all set.

now seeing as you have a vga connector this would really help for gaming since its the straight signal with no conversions. you could also use this connection with the dvd decoder card, but i'll bet you money you'll get a better picture through the s-video since the s-video connection will be filtered specifically for tv's. my dad has a mitsubishi 65" that has a vga connector and this is the conclusion i have come to after first hand experience. i don't have my computer connected to it all the time, but with the decoder card you can actually turn playback from the monitor connection to the s-video connection then just swap your video input on the bigscreen and you'd be watching it with the better quality. you'd end up with two video connections between the big screen and the decoder card.

for the video card just focus on games as your vid card will do nothing for dvd playback and really shouldn't (yuck). theres a pass through cable from the video card to the decoder card which then goes to the big screen/monitor. don't worry this doesn't affect performance at all.

the best thing about the decoder card is that you have built in dolby digital through the spidf (spelling?) so you can just run with onboard sound if need be and not be forced to pay ungodly rates for a dolby digital sound card.

wow this is longer than i expected... if you have anything else to ask by all means post away

btw.. to all you people that think i post too much... here you go. a nice long quality post

And if you are looking for an optical drive, Check out this LG All in one drive.

Penguin4x4 said:

And if you are looking for an optical drive, Check out this LG All in one drive.

Click to expand...

not bad at all... but you can get two seperate better quality drives for much cheaper.

probly 30-40 for the dvd and 50-70ish (depending on how demanding you are) for the cdrw.

i'd stick with pioneer or toshiba for dvd and liteon or plextor for cdrw.

Hey thanks guys.....quick answers cause I have to go to work right now.
Thank Triflux for the spelling advice....I uselly catch those!
I want to go Intel cause a already have extra parts laying around...cpu, rambus ect. The plan is as I upgrade my personal system (in sig) the old parts go to the tv. The tv system like I said will be mainly used for dvd, sound system and home files....gaming is secondary. I saw that decoder card yesterday...it looks great. I don't need a cdrw cause I hace one in my personal system. Maxvla...Tv's a Mitsubishi like your dad's....less than a year old...it's awsome!

Thanks again....gotta go.

Ah, in that case, I vote for a Toshiba SD-M1612, and VisionTek GeForce 2 Ti.

why not get an all-in-wonder ati card? (Get a light version of the 8500, if on tight budget the 7500)

works alot better for tv dont it?

I don't think that he wants a AIW based card. If I'm wrong though, AIW 7500. for a sound card, I would go with a Turtle Beach/Voyetra Santa Cruz.

then get the toshiba penguin found and the decoder card.

as far as gaming i would highly suggest the gigabyte radeon 8500 that silversinksam found for 87 bucks. you won't find a better deal on a video card than that. even a decent gf2 ti is going to cost almost that and the radeon will easily whip up on the gf2 ti. they are just different steps in hardware evolution. gf2 ti is a few years old while the radeon is pretty recent.

unless you plan on doing alot of gaming, overclocking doesn't really make sense here since your computer, even playing the dvd's shouldn't ever use more than 50% of your processor. now if you plan on a 55" quake 3 frag fest then overclocking would be a good idea.

keep it coming

The only reason I picked ENPC was to get that cheapo card, and since it's better to buy from one place. The Toshiba's are cheaper @ NewEgg. Seems that NewEgg is out of those refurb Gigabytes. New Gigabyte 8500LEs are 99 though,. And the Toshiba's are 41.

Penguin4x4 said:

The only reason I picked ENPC was to get that cheapo card, and since it's better to buy from one place. The Toshiba's are cheaper @ NewEgg. Seems that NewEgg is out of those refurb Gigabytes. New Gigabyte 8500LEs are 99 though,. And the Toshiba's are 41.

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oh... didn't know they were out. if that was where he found them. i didn't really check into it much.

still 99 bucks for a radeon 8500 is a steal! and a much better buy than a gf2ti or even gf3ti200 which you will end up spending about the same money for a good ti200 and the radeon will eclipse its performance.

thats a good price on the toshiba. i bought my toshiba dvd drive and the decoder card for 50 bucks together may 2001. i think it was a misprint on their site but they honored it. the reason i think so is cause it was only up for a day, then i couldn't find a trace of it. needless to say thats gotta be the best deal i've gotten on computer parts ever.

i would only buy from newegg.com but thats just me. i like having good customer service and a solid responsible company processing my order. im not saying enpc is bad. i just trust newegg.

i also second the turtle beach santa cruz. that will perform well enough for gaming. i think the cheapest dolby digital card is an oem audigy which is about 70-80 bucks. the santa cruz can be had for significantly less.

Here is a forum that specializes in HTPC's (Home Theater Personal Computers) There are things that I learned on those forums that I did not know existed

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=26

Jim

Niiiiiiiiice link! Well, went to NewEgg, Gigabyte 8500LE, Toshiba 16x DVD, and ASUS P4T Refurb come to $211.

Hey maxwedge, you should get the following card instead of the Real Magic Hollywood Plus, http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/xcard.htm , Its much better. Plus Sigma Designs have stopped driver support for the Hollywood Plus.

These card give better DVD decoding and output than a standalone DVD player, cause I have tested it personally.

I was going to suggest that one, but I thought'd be too expensive. Here is a review, and here is another

Penguin4x4 said:

I was going to suggest that one, but I thought'd be too expensive. Here is a review, and here is another

Click to expand...

my thougts exactly... that card is twice as much even on pricewatch.com. frankly its not worth it.

the hollywood plus is about 40 bucks at a good vendor. the xcard is minimum 92 bucks at a pricewatch (who knows) quality vendor.

Here is a forum that specializes in HTPC's (Home Theater Personal Computers) There are things that I learned on those forums that I did not know existed

Click to expand...

That's a great link Vfrjim....look's like there's a lot to learn from that site.

The Xcard is definitly in and same with the Toshiba. I think 1st I need to tell ya what I allready have, because I need to try and use this stuff. Ati Radeon 32mb ddr card (I same as 7500?), willy 1.9 cpu w/stock heat sink, 512mb kingston rdram, lan card, The two 80gig HD's in my system, and Xp thats in stalled on those hard drives. What I really want to do is buy one of those P4T533 and use this TH7 for the tv, but I haven't heard enough positive about that board yet and I'd like 512 rims with it! And when Intell does their labor day price cut I'll get a new woody and put this 1.8 in the tv rig.
Ok at this point what I need to get is the ....board, drive, Xcard, cheap case for now (want $350 rack mount), power supply (gonna get 550w antec to replace 400w in power rig...400 goes to tv).
I'm gonna try out onboard sound for now cause I'm just going to use the tv speakers at this point.
On the board I may just buy another TH711R (A-bit fan?? ) cause I can get it for $123 at atacom.com.

Oh...I'm gonna read those reviews on the decoder cards now.

Thanks again

not much difference in dvd playback between the two cards... i just don't see the need to spend an extra 52 bucks.