2011-12-26, 04:21
So, Merry Christmas to me. Turned on the TV today and found a blue screen. Rebooted, and the box wouldn't post. Power su pply is grinding, and the motherboard and video card are fried. No idea about the memory. I sure as hell hope my drives are ok - haven't tested those yet.
My dead box is a 6 year old machine made from cobbled-together parts (old ePox mobo, old 500-watt psu, amd64 3200, 3gb ram (4th ram slot was dead on mobo), Radeon HD 4550 video card, Hauppague TV tuner card, 1 80GB system drive, 2x 1TB and 2x 2TB drives (using Synctoy to mirror the data drives, so only 3TB capacity, about 80% full), running non-RAID on Windows 7. Kinda clunky, but it worked rather well until today. It was a cram-everything-into-a-case build.
I've been out of the hardware game for awhile and I'm not sure quite where to start. I've looked at a bunch of other threads here, but I can't make heads or tails as to what processors are ideal for me, what video setups are best, if i need a card or if i can do a video-on-a-chip setup.
So... help?
I use the box mostly with downloaded local video. No netflix. Very little Hulu, but regular Flash-streaming from hockeystreams.com.
Would it be best to make a standard ATX mid-tower build and cram all the drives in one box again? Or would it make sense to split it into a HTPC front-end box and a NAS backend? The computer itself is in a different room than TV so I'm not real worried about aesthetics or some noise.
And, most importantly, how cheaply can I do this? I'd love to keep this under $300 if at all possible. Let's assume that the drives are OK, the DVD drive is ok, and the TV tuner card is ok. The case and cables and fans are fine if I go ATX. I'd like to stay on Windows 7 running XBMC, a browser, and uTorrent.
My dead box is a 6 year old machine made from cobbled-together parts (old ePox mobo, old 500-watt psu, amd64 3200, 3gb ram (4th ram slot was dead on mobo), Radeon HD 4550 video card, Hauppague TV tuner card, 1 80GB system drive, 2x 1TB and 2x 2TB drives (using Synctoy to mirror the data drives, so only 3TB capacity, about 80% full), running non-RAID on Windows 7. Kinda clunky, but it worked rather well until today. It was a cram-everything-into-a-case build.
I've been out of the hardware game for awhile and I'm not sure quite where to start. I've looked at a bunch of other threads here, but I can't make heads or tails as to what processors are ideal for me, what video setups are best, if i need a card or if i can do a video-on-a-chip setup.
So... help?
I use the box mostly with downloaded local video. No netflix. Very little Hulu, but regular Flash-streaming from hockeystreams.com.
Would it be best to make a standard ATX mid-tower build and cram all the drives in one box again? Or would it make sense to split it into a HTPC front-end box and a NAS backend? The computer itself is in a different room than TV so I'm not real worried about aesthetics or some noise.
And, most importantly, how cheaply can I do this? I'd love to keep this under $300 if at all possible. Let's assume that the drives are OK, the DVD drive is ok, and the TV tuner card is ok. The case and cables and fans are fine if I go ATX. I'd like to stay on Windows 7 running XBMC, a browser, and uTorrent.
