Hi Vault9,

I have yet another PC Mission to do. One of my mates has finally decided to throw out his VCR / DVD Combo that he has been hanging onto to for years and get a Media Center Computer so that he can record TV with it and burn stuff onto TV.

Anyway i said i would help him out in his hunt but then again your suggestions with my PC were very helpfull so once again i\'m asking V9 for suggestions on it.

Well here is the specifications that he has told me:

• Core 2 Duo Or Better
• Able to record Live TV from atleast 3 sources
• Dual Screen Capability - one connection to a LCD Screen, the other to connect to the TV Screen
• Big Hard Drive
• DVD Burner
• Room for next gen optical drive
• Not really needed for gaming
• Windows Vista?
• As an estimate R 12,000

Well i've looked about and i found this

geez core 2 duo for a media center pc??? are you #$^& mal? but I guess if you go software encoding route then you'd rather get a decent CPU and more RAM....

any motherboard is sufficient - as long as it's cheap

any GPU that is not entry level can support 3 monitors 2 via DVI 1 TV OUT

as for TV you would want a decent TV decoder that does HARDWARE encoding and not the shitty software encoding...

RAM you need at least 2gigs with 4gigs prefered if you going software encoding route - DO NOT GET DDR677 as DDR800 is mainstream nowdays. X-FI sound card is an overkill throw that out the equation for a MCE

you might want to get a MCE remote control to do the recording without a KB and mouse

I reckon that looks like a decent PC!

Still i reckon hat whomever the guy the pc is menat for will want it to have decent performance. So keep the Conroe or downgrade if you need to cut costs. X Fi is really overkill. Get a decent alternative

You don't need CPU power for a media center PC, it'll just go to waste playing video and burning stuff.

Just get something basic and spend the extra cash on more HDD space or something.

What are you sugesting? I tell him to put a P4 or something into the machine? Or how about a 1.86 Conroe?

How exactly will the dual screens function, ie will he be able to alternate between the Tv screen and the PC monitor quickly .i.e start off watching tv on the screen and then swap it to show the Desktop oin the Tv screen?

It's called multi view... most graphics cards support 2 monitors along with a TV out optional... the mid-to-top range cards support 2 DVI/HDMI monitors and 1 TV out connector via S-Video

Okay well here is an update.

We have got a deal. After loooking around, i spotted a config that fitted the bar nicely for him. Since he decided he wanted some gaming capability as well i added on an 8500

Elite Essential
System Base Price: £ 254.47
Intel® Pentium® E2160 Dual Core Processor(1.80GHz,1MB Cache,800MHz)
Genuine Windows Vista™ Ultimate Edition [upg £ 100.00]
Digital & Analogue TV Tuner PCI Card + Vista Remote [upg £ 40.07]
New MESH Mini-Tower Micro ATX Case +300W PSU
PCI-Express Mainboard - Pentium® D/Core™ 2 Duo - Micro ATX
2GB DDR2 667MHz Memory - (2x 1GB) [upg £ 50.00]
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer [upg £ 30.00]
LightScribe Super Format 18x Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM
LightScribe Super Format 18x Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM [upg £ 25.00]
256MB nVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT - DVI, HDTV, TV-Out [upg £ 70.00]
19" Widescreen LCD TFT Display with internal speakers [upg £ 100.00]
DVI connector Cable [upg £ 4.20]
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Sound Card (oem) [upg £ 60.00]
Logitech Cordless Keyboard & Cordless Optical Mouse [upg £ 20.00]
Free Microsoft® Works® 8.5 + 60 Days Microsoft Office Trial
Free Cyberlink Video Editing Suite - 7 titles (oem)
Creative Labs HN-700 noise-cancelling Headphones [upg £ 29.00]
1x Gigabit LAN (onboard)
Multi-format Memory Card Reader (matx)

Final cost ZAR 11,000

any last minute suggestions as he will be ordering in 3 days from now

300W PSU. are you mad?

He is getting a Antec 850W PSU put in after the pc is bought. We couldn't get a decent deal made with Mesh directly.

http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=27850

ahh okay. that is better. take that 300 and turf it.

Will do, guess i forgot to include that in my first post

8500 ain't going to play any games in the soon future

Well the deal is done and if need be it can be upgraded

Thanks for the help