Building a 'beastly' home theater PC

[Mr. Guru]

Alright, I've had some discussion with mcgoo about this but I'd love for everyone who knows about this stuff to chime in.

I don't know anything about computers. What is RAM?!?!

Anyways, I want to build (or buy, but the satisfaction of building would make it that much better) a computer that will only serve as a home theater system.

What do I look for? What is essential? What can I 'cheap' out on?

Obviously lots of storage (space?). Mcgoo was also saying something about video/audio but it sounded Chinese to me!

This is what I want (in normal english), and hopefully the DH community can steer me in the right direction.


at least one HDMI port....do i need more?
wireless keyboard and mouse (so is that 2 USB ports??? I should probably have more....right?
a small unit.....so it doesn't look out of place on the tv stand
I want it to play dvd's....soooo a dvd spot thing
storage space, how much?...would external hard drive be smart? And I guess I want to 'mirror my drives'. So throw that in there.

Operating system? I think I read somewhere that a Linux cpu is like $100 cheaper....and does the job just as good? Does that make sense?

what else?

EDIT: Low noise would be a big thing too.

I only want it to play/stream movies/tv shows from xbmc. That and playing (and burning) an actual DVD from time to time is it's only use.


I have no idea what my budget would be either. Ideally, I don't want to spend more than $5-600 but, again, I have no idea what to expect.

Eventually, Im hoping this thing takes over my cable subscription.

Can't wait to see the replies.

Thanks

[TheZamboniGuy]

About download movie : you can plug your computer via HDMI slot to your tv and Watch movie without burning dvd, it's better like this, because some high quality movie are heavy gig, and Dvd cost not a lot but you can put your money elsewhere like in a quality hdmi wire. Also some dvd or ps3 to read those dvd's are not compatible with some quality downlaod movie, but it's always working via your computer.

[Mr. Guru]

I know that....but being able to burn a dvd would be a nice feature to have..........

[mister_mcgoo]

Haha Guru, you shoulda told me to dumb it down for you, I didn't mean to be speaking another language. Lets start simple:

CPU is the puter's 'brain', CPUs are rated by GHz, the bigger the number the more calculations the brain can process per second. You'll also see the word 'core' (i.e. dual core, quad-core, etc), that just means that they paste these 'brains' together to get more performance. So a dual-core 2Ghz is loosely the equivalent of a single 4Ghz processor

RAM is the puter's 'working memory'. Imagine your boss gives you a task to do and you have to do it with a big pile of paper documents that he gives you. So you lay all these docs out on your desk so you can see them all at once and compare values between them etc. The bigger the desk, the more docs you can lay out right? The desk is RAM.

You need HDMI out from the puter to either your receiver, or TV. You only need one output but you'll need a dedicated video card for that. Most of the cards they make these days will also handle the audio signal so you get Video+Audio all over the HDMI cable (which is as it should be). Something like this:

USB ports, I would get at least 4 so that you can plug in flash drives or other accessories. I highly recommend you get a bluetooth keyboard like this (all you do is plug a little usb stick into the puter and you get keyboard/mouse all in one neat package, it's plug n play): I use Logitech ones, they rock

For hard drives you'll need two (to mirror). I use WD Green because they are energy efficient and quiet

[mister_mcgoo]

oh and this:

Operating system? I think I read somewhere that a Linux cpu is like $100 cheaper....and does the job just as good? Does that make sense?

this is a generalization but for all intents and purposes CPUs are operating-system independent...so you can install either Windows or Linux on your computer as you choose. Windows 7 is the most stable I've used from Microsoft in a long time. For linux of course it is free which is a bonus and I would probably choose Ubuntu or Debian. I have never configured XBMC on linux though so I have no advice there