Noob looking for advice

[balkranjit]

hey guys been on the forums reading about.
Im new to the HTPC thing, and was looking for something simple.

Plan was to connect it to my tv and just watch HD youtube videos, maybe downloading torrent files. And watching downloaded content, not really concerned with storage space, usually i watch something and delete it shortly after and have other means of backing/storage.

i have found someone selling one dont know if its a good deal hope you guys can give me some help. Or recommend maybe buying my own and building, I dont mind reading guides and getting more help.

The one im looking at has:
In Win case
two 160GB Harddrive
the cpu is E6400 core 2 duo
motherboard is GA-73PVM-S2H
4GB DDR2 RAM
HDMI,DVI,VGA optical output digital output.
Gigabit Lan.

His price is 300$ CAN. let me know if its worth it or to go and build my own basic box. thanks

[dr_dream]

A bit old.... and nothing about the graphic card? I think you can find better deals on ebay

[balkranjit]

hey thanks for the response dream, i was about to buy it yesterday but i thought i wait for a reply.

ill keep looking.

[Arinoth]

There are a few options out there for you. One could be an atom system as it is rather small/compact, has dvi/vga/hdmi out, has its own decent graphics card and can typically display HD flash content and 720p-1080i content with no problems at all. At least the atom system i had (well selling now since i moved to a htpc/server) was able to do this with no issues. The beauty of these things is that they are very small/compact so you can shove them into a small case, they can be passively (no cpu fan) or actively cooled, a lot of them have a wireless adapter or come with a power brick, the cpu/mobo come together, and they typically can go for under 200$ new or a bit less used (like 160$ or below).

The limitation to that is you cannot install a graphics card onto it, it only has 3 sata connectors, potentially can struggle with 1080p content, and may seem 'slow' when doing multiple takes but is fine when watching youtube or something played using vlc (or other graphic card accelerated media players).

You of course could go the route you are looking at right now which is just a used older system, but those like the one you linked is worth more say about half of what they are charging and may/most likely will need a separate graphics card.

The final avenue would be building your own from scratch, which could be had for a decent price, did my htpc/server for about 300$ (excluding hdds and ram) but of course new will always run you more then used.

[balkranjit]

hey thanks for the reply,

i did look into a few of those asus ee box or whatever they called them. and just like you mentioned they good for 720P no 1080P according to most review.

i think im ready to bite the bullet and try building my own budget one.

any recommendations on parts, again dont want to do much more than simple web surfing, watching downloaded content, a little bit of bittorrent or streaming HD youtube and other sources.

so nothing to crazy but if you guys have some options let me know and ill try sourcing parts togeather.