Couple of questions,
1) are there any HTPC news groups
2) any one got any "useful" ideas for the below spare parts
1ghz celeron 370pin(coppermine it think)
asus tuwe(matx, 3 pci, no agp, 810 chipset i think)
256 mb sdram pc 100(128 x2)
32x cd-rom
got a case already, looking to spend max of £50. Ideas so far are, media
centre pc, network server, and network media server(basically like a MC pc
but minus an display card aka one big hard drive)
Thanks
--
"Blu-Ray"
2600+Sempron (O/C @2.046Ghz)
512Mb DDR 400
9600 pro 128 (O/C @ 425/540)
Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ mobo with 400mhz fsb
Raidmax cobra case with 420w psu
On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:21:39 GMT, "Veritech"
<avis.dalrymple@ntlworld.com> wrote:
That's a pretty open-ended question...
max of £50 won't do anything useful though, for starters you
need a fairly large HDD, else what's the point of a separate
fileserver? HTPC could use an existing LAN for video
storage and retrieval but the 50 isn't even enough to
stretch for a hardware capture card and a low-end hard
drive. With a hardware encoder type of capture card the
Celery 1GHz is fast enough, yet with a software based
encoder it's marginal, can probably do moderate (640x480)
resolution MPEG2 but it'd be borderline, possibly inadequate
for MPEG4/Divx/WMV/etc.
The system is well suited for either light, general-purpose
use like office/email/web, or a file server (whether it be
media files or some other is rather irrelevant if this is
for a single or very limited number of users, such that it's
not an issue of needing more memory to cache entire files
and such, there wouldn't be large #s of requests to serve).
That's probably what I'd do with it, turn it into a file
server, no more involved than NAS functionality and maybe
even underclock the CPU, as a Celeron 1GHz on 66MHz FSB
(667MHz resulting speed) is cool enough running that it
might be cooled passively with the right airflow, even more
likely if undervolted to ~ 1.35-1.45V. Celery @ 667 is
certainly fast enough for 100Mbit lan for 2 or 3 users, the
amount of memory would be more significant up to a certain
point.
Need a few remote video cameras? Get some usb 'cams and set
up a streaming video server.
Then there's always the option of finding some needy person
and giving it to them or charging them almost nothing
