I would like to build my second Media PC. The first did not work out well - Not sure if it was the m/b chipsets or me. Tried both Nvidia NF3 w/2800+ and NF4 Ultra with 3000+ AMD.
--- Both of these options following options are probably within $30 of each other --- So with 1 gig of DDR400 sitting around, looking first at the: ASUS P5PE-VM LGA 775 Intel 865G Micro ATX Intel Motherboard cause it takes DDR 400 and recycling the ram saves me $125 or so over good quality DDR2 800. The m/b has 3 pci slots for Thunder550 TV & ATI HDTV TV cards that I already own. It has ON-BOARD video which I assume is adequate for a MediaPC. By going this direction I can afford the E6600 which could migrate to a different board if I ever needed it to in the future. I've seen enough conflict opinions that the DDR 400 wouldn't be a tremendous drop off from the ddr2. ***THE ONLY CON I SEE***, for right now, is that there are only 2 DDR slots on the board so I could not add a second GB of ram in the future. ======== The other direction would be to go with the ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe Socket 939 ATI CrossFire Radeon Xpress 3200 M/B I could also recycle my DDR400 here BUT BE ABLE to add ram in the future as it has 4 memory slots. I would probably go with AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ as that seems price/performance the sweet spot for AMD right now. Its roughly $100 cheaper than the Conroe, but I would have to add a video card and it seems as though I would have to spend about $80 for an entry level Crossfire compatible video card. ======== It could totally be my imagination, but it seems to me I have been more successful with tv cards, etc, on Intel Chipsets. Could be my imagination. ======== Obviously the first option gets me more horsepower ======== It could be that this gets upgraded to Vista in the future, though I don't see an issue with either direction if that happens. Any/all opinions gratefully accepted. Bob
