Building Some New Computers
posted in Hardware, Technology |I’m working on building a few new computers over the summer and will try to chronicle some of the planning process here. Ideally I want to build a new PC for my car (to act as a music player replacing my existing HD player that has been broken for 2 years), a new main desktop for my office and a new Media Center. For the desktop (which will actually go under the desk or maybe in a cabinet) and Media Center I’m planning to wait for the 45nm new Intel chips to come out so it will be at least a few months.
For the media center I’ve got a few goals-
- Nice form-factor case. My existing Dell in a traditional large size Dell box doesn’t fit where I need it. Any of the somewhat small-form-factor or media-equipment cases should work. I don’t care about fancy media displays on the front of the case, I’d ideally like the minimum size and easy to hide out of the way.
- Quiet. Its going in my bedroom so as quiet as possible is a high priority.
- Decent graphics performance. I probably don’t need top of the line, but I’ve got a 24″ LCD hooked up so I need something that can drive high resolution at HD-DVD quality. And that isn’t loud and fits in my case. I’m hoping one of the new NVidia 8600s that are rumored to be coming out in a few weeks might fit the bill. The NVidia 7600 I have now is not quite fast enough to do HD-DVD without flaws.
- I’m assuming that 2GB RAM should be plenty. I’m not planning on running virtualization, but it does need to be able to handle recording two shows at once, playing back locally and remoting to 1-2 X-Box 360s.
- I expect a quad-core 2.66ghz should do the trick on the CPU front. See above why I need plenty of CPU (especially given that remoting to XBoxes sometimes requires real-time transcoding).
- For hard-disk I assume I’ll have 1 1TB drive, 2 if I happen to have room.
- I wish something like cable-card were an option but it doesn’t look like it is, and from what I hear it barely works even when it is an option (its OEM-machine only at the moment).
Selecting the right case seems like a key first step and its a giant pain. I really haven’t seen many options out there that are reasonably small, very quiet, have enough room for an OK video card + a tuner or two (possibly analog + digital), etc. There are small and loud boxes. There are big and quiet ones. Few that combine both qualities. Another advantage of keeping the box small is that its easier to reuse it somewhere else in the house in 3 years once this machine is obsolete.