HTPC building

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tenyearguarantee

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#27729 4-Nov-2008 22:10

Hey i have a pc that seems to be a bit under powered in the gaming area. Am looking at turning this old girl into a home theatre pc

right now its an AMD X2 3800+ with a on board 6150 and 3GB ram. I read that the 6150 has HD acceleration but does that mean that it will handle playing back blu rays, or would it just be easier to start from scratch?

oh and my pci e slot is buggered, was a bit too rough with it

pistolpower

139 posts

Master Geek

#175958 5-Nov-2008 00:34

Dude i think your pcs cpu can just do it. If you have not allready goten a dvb decoder then you should get one and try it out, as regardless of whether or not your pc can run it fine enough a new pc will.

A new htpc wouldnt cost that much and theres an example of one below here lol. I don't know if the audio on the motherboards decent or not but this one would do the job you want and you can plug it straight into your lcd screen. The only thing i really left out was a $10 keyboard and mouse combo pack and left it without a hdd so you could pick what you wanted. Depending on your needs you might change the mobo to allow you to put more hdds in or something i dont know. You would need to check to make shure that this would work but here is an example of one below:

QTY

CODE

DESCRIPTION

PRICE

TOTAL

STOCK

108094

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E7300 2.66Ghz 3M 1066Mhz LGA775

$202.00

Mt Roskill Branch: Available Royal Oak Branch: Available

107958

Asus P5KPL-C/1600 LGA775, Intel G31/ICH7 Chipset, MicroATX , FSB 1600/1333/1066/800MHz, Pentium 4/Pentium D/PentiumEE/Core2Duo/Core2EE/Quad-core/45nm, 2*DDR2-1066(O.C*)/800/667, PCI EX16, PCIeX1*1, PCI*2, GBLAN, 4xSATAII, 6 Channel Sound

$89.61

108011

PQI 2GB DDR2 800Mhz PC2-6400 CL5 240pin

$41.20

$82.40

108037

Gigabyte 550W Superb Power Supply Cable Management 120mm Fan, PCI-E(6+2) Conn., 4x SATA Power Connectors, RoHS

$77.25

108214

Asus 9500GT MAGIC/HTDP/512M DDR2 PCI Express 2.0, D-Sub / DVI-I, HDMI

$111.10

107550

ICute ZL02-3G-BB Black Case USB Audio, No PSU

$41.20

108324

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR2200 PCI-Express Dual Tuner TV Receiver

$128.75

Mt Roskill Branch: Available Royal Oak Branch: On Order

Key in quantity to check further discounted price

Sub Total

$732.31

Shipping Cost

$0.00

Total Tax

$91.54

(Freight Charge is not included) Total Amount Due

$823.85

YOUR SAVINGS TODAY!
Dealer savings	$19.72
Quantity savings	$0.00

eXDee

4025 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#175959 5-Nov-2008 00:40

tenyearguarantee: Hey i have a pc that seems to be a bit under powered in the gaming area. Am looking at turning this old girl into a home theatre pc

right now its an AMD X2 3800+ with a on board 6150 and 3GB ram. I read that the 6150 has HD acceleration but does that mean that it will handle playing back blu rays, or would it just be easier to start from scratch?

oh and my pci e slot is buggered, was a bit too rough with it

6150 has no HD acceleration in terms of h264.

Sure its completely dead? Got any PCI-E 4x slots? 8x slots?
Even a 1x slot will apparently work.

tenyearguarantee

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#176008 5-Nov-2008 09:13

hey cheers for your replies

not 100% its dead. I had a 7300GS in there and tried to put a 9600gt in its place but the gt didnt work. tried to put the gs back and that didnt work either... gave the gt to a flatmate to try in his and it worked fine

i dont know how to go about checking if the slot is completely useless

my motherboard only appeared to have the one slot, that being said i didnt exactly look for another...

sbiddle

29129 posts

Uber Geek

Moderator

Trusted

Biddle Corp

Lifetime subscriber

#176012 5-Nov-2008 09:18

Unless you can get a GFX card going for hardware accelertion you'll have no luck with that machine. The CPU is too slow for software decoding.

nzkc

879 posts

Ultimate Geek

#176235 5-Nov-2008 23:28

The PCIe slot isnt disabled in your BIOS by any chance is it?

Simple to check and very easy to fix if it is.

I have a motherboard with an on board 6150. But that's now disabled and I use a nVidia 8500 for Freeview HD. I run a AMD X2 3600 and with the 8500 it copes easily with Freeview. Can watch 1 channel and record two others with no bother at all. Haven't pushed it beyond that (haven't needed to) but really its down to hard drive speed for the number of channels you can concurrently record.

Oh and that reminds me, my BIOS had an option to change from using the onboard graphics to an external graphics card. Perhaps that needs tweaking for your problem above.