Hey guys, I have never built an HTPC before as I have only done gaming rigs.
This is also a suprise for my father-in-law from me, my wife, my mother-in-law, and granny for xmas and bday (october 20th).
Now the build I doing has the AMD Llano A8 3850, gigabyte ud2h, 1tb hdd, 4gb of ram, 350watt psu, and a bluray drive.
all for a total, w/ case, of $517
To save money I am going to run ubuntu on it with xbmc and for storing all his movies and music on the system. (i figured he isnt going to be using it to sync his itunes with his ipod anyways.)
However, i read somewhere else in a sticky that xbmc only works on x86 chipsets in the sticky that talked about the ps3/wii/xb360....
So do i need to redo this build and get a intel chip and different mobo in it?
Thanks
i have installed Live on a 2.5ghz celeron with 768mb ram and a 10gb hdd, with an ATI radeon 9600 before.
as above, you'll be fine!
GREAT!
Like i said i was just concerned about it running on ubuntu on this hardware. Time to hit the ORDER button
If you're going to be running linux make sure you have a nvidia video card that is capable of vdpau as video playback and drivers aresuperior to any other type of gpu, although this is starting to change.
well I am actually just relying on the built in gpu at first and he will most likely do the lower end radeon to have 3d later down the road.
Which raises another question....how do you install driver updates for videocards on ubuntu?
madbrayniak Wrote:well I am actually just relying on the built in gpu at first and he will most likely do the lower end radeon to have 3d later down the road.
Which raises another question....how do you install driver updates for videocards on ubuntu?
For an nvidia card you can do the following:
Code:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings
madbrayniak Wrote:well I am actually just relying on the built in gpu at first and he will most likely do the lower end radeon to have 3d later down the road.
Which raises another question....how do you install driver updates for videocards on ubuntu?
Steer clear of any Ati/radeon cards, the video acceleration is no where near as good as nvidia (just search the forums). A low end nvidia card (gt430?) will play any content you throw at it plus have enough power for deinterlacing and upscaling.
AWSOME!
I personally prefer Nvidia cards myself but i was thinking that pairing a radeon with the built in gpu in the a8 would be a better upgrade path.
I am going to put ubuntu 11.04 on it at first as i have read in a few places that xbmc can work on it now with a few changes in terminal and I will install handbrake for dvd/bluray ripping. I am also hoping that i can get all his music on it before he sees it so that I can get a few movies on it too for him and have it all tested and ready to go.
I know that he is going to have everything stored on it locally so I want to make sure it is going to run smoothly and have the audio go through the hdmi to receiver for decoding into dtshd and dolby gd....
is there going to be a problem getting the bluray driver to work at all?