- Jan 12, 2014
- 12
- 0
- 10,520
First post ever so please be gentle 
I helped my friend move the other day and to show his gratitude he let me take his old gaming rig for parts. It's probably about 5-6 years old, but it was a nice rig back in the day so i'm hoping i can salvage some of the parts to use in an HTPC. This will connect to a NAS (FreeNAS) full of media content so being able to transcode stuff on the fly is a must. Not sure if this matters, but I am not 100% sold on what software i will be using; I'm leaning towards windows 7 OS with XMBC.
I'm going to critique potential drawbacks as I list the spare parts, and then I'll list the parts I'm thinking about using to round out the build.
Parts I'm hoping to use:
■ nForce 680i SLI motherboard LGA 775. downside with this is that the SATA is only 3 GB/s. I will be using a small SSD for Windows, XMBC, and other necessary software.
■ Intel Core 2 Duo 3.30Ghz. Seems like it meets XMBC's minimum requirements for 1080p transocding, but any real world experience would be appreciated.
■ Nvidia 9800 GTX GPU, 512 MBThis was the high-end GeForce 9 series card and I'm pretty sure it will be enough, but any real world experience is appreciated
■ 4 x 1GB DDR2 (1066MHz).This is probably the one thing I feel I'll have to upgrade. 4GB seems like the bare minimum, but if people think it's enough I'll take your word for it.
■ 1000W PSU. Complete overkill I know, but I believe my friend had multiple cards at one time. I will probably get a smaller PSU at some point to save on energy, and reduce heat.■
New parts:
■ 64GB ssd. Probably something like crucial M4.
■ Silverstone Case. Not sure exactly which one, but there are a couple of purty ones that are big enough for my GPU.
■ Ceton InfiniTV tuner card.
I think that covers everything. Now please shout out any random thought you have in regards to my build.
I helped my friend move the other day and to show his gratitude he let me take his old gaming rig for parts. It's probably about 5-6 years old, but it was a nice rig back in the day so i'm hoping i can salvage some of the parts to use in an HTPC. This will connect to a NAS (FreeNAS) full of media content so being able to transcode stuff on the fly is a must. Not sure if this matters, but I am not 100% sold on what software i will be using; I'm leaning towards windows 7 OS with XMBC.
I'm going to critique potential drawbacks as I list the spare parts, and then I'll list the parts I'm thinking about using to round out the build.
Parts I'm hoping to use:
■ nForce 680i SLI motherboard LGA 775. downside with this is that the SATA is only 3 GB/s. I will be using a small SSD for Windows, XMBC, and other necessary software.
■ Intel Core 2 Duo 3.30Ghz. Seems like it meets XMBC's minimum requirements for 1080p transocding, but any real world experience would be appreciated.
■ Nvidia 9800 GTX GPU, 512 MBThis was the high-end GeForce 9 series card and I'm pretty sure it will be enough, but any real world experience is appreciated
■ 4 x 1GB DDR2 (1066MHz).This is probably the one thing I feel I'll have to upgrade. 4GB seems like the bare minimum, but if people think it's enough I'll take your word for it.
■ 1000W PSU. Complete overkill I know, but I believe my friend had multiple cards at one time. I will probably get a smaller PSU at some point to save on energy, and reduce heat.■
New parts:
■ 64GB ssd. Probably something like crucial M4.
■ Silverstone Case. Not sure exactly which one, but there are a couple of purty ones that are big enough for my GPU.
■ Ceton InfiniTV tuner card.
I think that covers everything. Now please shout out any random thought you have in regards to my build.
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