So ive been thinking about building a new XBMC, my old lappy is starting to struggle with cooling. basically i want to spend as little money as possible, but still be able to watch 1080p content with 7.1 audio. from what i can tell raspmbc doesnt quit get there, and apple tv only outputs 720p content. any suggestions? I have been looking at the following: nmediapc 7000b case gigabyte ga-a75m-ds2 motherboard AMD 16-3500 2.1ghz Llano processor 8gb mushkin essentials ddr3 1333 55gb refurbed ssd this clocks in at 309.45, could save 15 by going down to a 30gb SSD, or skip the ssd and use a existing one
Any $500 laptop with HDMI out can pretty much do that these days. If you want to get more involved you could build a microATX box. If you go that rout go with one of AMD APU chips so you don't need to buy or fit a Video Card in it.
Are you just watching movies on it? If that's all your doing you don't need an SSD at all and 4g of ram would be more then enough. If Enigma is still around he can probably give you some better advice I haven't really been keeping up on the hardware lately. I've heard of people building media comps for under $200 before but I couldn't really tell you if it's possible right now or not.
i got it down to 200 with... nmedia 7000b $80 MSI fM2-a55m-e33 $45 AMD A4-5300 $55 G Skill value ram 4gb DDR3 1333 $21
Just make sure that chip can do the 1080p and what ever else you wanted and you still need some kind of hard drive.
Im not really up on xbmc stuff. Mwhays is the guy to talk to on that APU's should be able to accelerate common video formats through its GPU, so the CPU speed shouldnt matter that much. But I dont know how well this works in practice.
jeez i guess me and hays are the guys for XBMC yeah an APU like that is MORE than enough, especially if a raspberry pi can do it lol also i have like 5 hard drives just laying around that would be plenty fine for that, the reason i picked an SSD for that earlier was just boot times but its always on anyway so its moot
Sorry, for taking a month to respond to this.. Im catching up on old posts. I was out for a few weeks.. So Bishop and I worked this out on TS a while back. Ill use this space to go over some of the new stuff thats working with the HTPC solutions. The facts are, it really takes very little power to successfully implement xbmc with full HD over HDMI anymore. Some of the more compressed mkvs with super high resolution take a little more to run reliably. and 3d movies take a little more. The AMD Apu's are an exciting development in the whole concept of low power low price HTPCs. It allows for a very good balance of Speed/Size/Price. Used to be, you looked at those three criteria and picked two. The APU's allow to have all three and give you the opportunity to liquid cool with a cheap closed loop cooler!!! Cheap/Quiet/Fast. I solidly recommend these mid to low end APU's for HTPC builds. Keep an eye out as Android based Pico-computers continue to become more common. This will lead to another game changer in the HTPC world. I can confirm that an Nvidia Tegra3 is fully capable of displaying a full resolution 3drip through HDMI over Wifi... it works. it rocks. And the fact that XBMC has quietly released XBMC Android... its looking up for us HTPC guys looking to leave Windows behind in our home networks!! Please feel free to find me in the FPS division in TS or PM or reply if you get questions!