I just recently built my own media center from scratch. The goal was to have a Media Center server in my house, on which I would store all of my DVD's, CD's, Photo's and Recorded TV programs. All of this information would be accessible from any room in the house, and on the road via the Internet. A few people have asked me about the specs for my machine, so I thought I would just post them here.
The goal of this computer was to be my Home Media Server, and therefore the specs are a little more than what is needed. I currently have Media Center 2005, Rollup 2 loaded, but my hope is to have Vista running on it soon.
The Media Center server is just the first step in "The Big Plan". I'll be making posts off and on again, as I add to it.
| Component |
Model |
| Motherboard |
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 NVidia nForce4 SLI ATX AMD |
|
I chose this motherboard, because it has a heatpipe cooling system on the Northbridge chipset, is SLI capable, accepted the Dual Core AMD processor, and support for overclocking. |
| CPU |
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 1GHz HT 2x512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core |
|
I chose this processor because it offered the best price per performance at the time. |
| Video Card |
eVGA 256-P2-N553-AX GeForce 7600GT CO 256 MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 |
|
I chose this video card because it is SLI capable, and wanted some ability to handle Vista when it comes out. |
| Hard Drive |
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD50000KS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s |
|
I chose this hard drive because I wanted to max out storage on my server. I paid a premium for the 500GB capacity, but it's quiet. I just recently added a second one bringing my capacity up to 1TB. I still have room in my case for 2 more drives. |
| Memory |
Corsair XMS 1GB (2x512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) DUal Channel Kit System |
|
I like Corsair memory, it has heat spreaders, and the price was right. |
| CPU Fan |
Zalman CNPS9500 LED 92mm 2 Ball Blue LED Light Cooling Fan with Heatsink |
|
I chose this fan, because Zalman makes great cooling products, in addition I was intalling this in a Zalman case with a Zalman power supply. |
| Case |
Zalman HD160-B Home Theatre Aluminum PC Enclosure w/Remote (Black) |
|
I chose this processor case because it was all aluminum, looked like a media center component, and got good reviews. I also seriously considered getting a Origen AE Case |
I already had a Hauppauge PVR 350, TV Tuner card so I recylced that into the system for watching and recording live tv.
Okay, so I've recently left my employer (after 15 yrs) to take some time off
and explore what I can do on my own, enhance my .net skills, architectural
designs and development process so I can bring increased value to my next
position, more on this in a later post perhaps.
This post will begin detailing my current development environment at home,
which has been cobbled together over the years and which I will continue to
enhance going forward.
Hesphaestus
Dual PIII-500 1G 20G HD W2K3
This is my main server machine which I haven't been using for awhile. Instead
I've been using Hades for my day to day machine. This may change soon as I've
recently ordered an
ATI 9600 for this machine so that I can have a dual monitor setup. I had
this at work, and I really miss it. I'll most likely make this my main machine
after the upgrade, then RDP into the others as needed. I have future plans for
this machine by upgrading the motherboard to an
ABIT-AN7 and hard drive to a SATA based interface. There are a couple of
problems with this machine, W2K3 doesn't recognize the 2nd processor, and it
doesn't let me to a repaving of the machine (windows setup chokes on it after
loading all the drivers at setup). Part of this may have to do with the SCSI
drive controller I have in it, but I'm not sure. I've done some googling on the
Dual Processor issue, but have to to find a solution. I'd rather not waste too
much time on this and instead get started developing.
Hades
Dell PIII-500 768M 6G HD XP
This is my main machine right now. It's really quiet but it doesn't have much
disk space nor a good video card and is maxed out memory wise. I'm going to
concentrate on upgrading Hesphaestus and may turn this into a dedicated build
machine or Linux machine.
Prometheus
Dell PIII Cpx Laptop 128M 12G HD XP
I'm just getting this machine configured, I'll need to buy a USB wireless card
for this so I can move about the house, stay connected when I'm out and about.
There are a couple of problems with this setup however. The battery doesn't work
and it only has 128M Ram. I can get and additional 256M for relatively cheap,
not so for the battery. The nice thing about this machine is I can swap out the
hard drive really easy allowing me to switch between XP and Linux (Gentoo!)
when I want to do Linux/Java/Mono work. Another nice thing is about this machine
is the ability to do dual monitors with the LCD and another monitor.
Well, I've rambled on far too long already. I've only detailed a small
portion of my development environment. I'll talk more about the software portion
(pertaining mainly to my .net development) in tomorrows post. I wrote this entry
with frontpage, hopefully this will allow me to do some better formatting in the
future, I'll also look at using infopath as described in this
post.