Thursday, August 6, 2009

Good Gear in Big Boxes


Well, looky what just arrived on my desk! An order from m'verygoodfriends at Umart down in Bris!

You may recall we've been having some troubles with our media centre PC at home. Where we last left off, I'd been speaking to Jeffa at Microsoft Oz, who suggested that the hardware I was running was just too old. I had kind of anticipated this, but had hoped he had some magical insights that would let me get out of spending money, but it was not to be!

The most sensible solution seemed to be to upgrade our main PC, and filter it's insides down to the media centre box. That has the dual benefits of significantly upgrading the MCE machine, but gives us the best bang-for-our-buck on our main use machine. And since Windows7 RTM is available for me to download tomorrow via Microsoft's corporate volume license website, I'll be building both machines with Win7 RTM. I've already been using the RC on the MCE machine, and it's been working brilliantly despite the hardware disadvantage, so I've got high hopes.


So - what have we got here??? :)

For the main machine:
  • Intel Corei7 920 CPU - full of quad-core goodness. The 920 is the smallest i7 you can get.
  • Gigabyte motherboard to suit the i7
  • 6Gb GSkill triple-channel DDR3. 6Gb is overkill for day to day stuff, but as I want to get more involved with editing out FullHD camcorder footage, it'll pay big dividends for those sorts of tasks.

For the MCE Machine:
From the main machine:
  • Intel Core2Duo CPU - replaces the old Athlon CPU
  • Gigabyte C2D motherboard
  • 4Gb DDR2 RAM
New from the order:
  • Corsair HX-620 low noise power supply - replaces the current old and very noisy PSU
  • 1Tb WD GreenPower HDD - plenty of space for recording TV
  • Compro Videomate dual DTV tuner card - for recording up to two TV shows at once
  • Sapphire video card with integrated HDMI out - includes it's own on-board 7.1 channel sound, and, more importantly, has a passive heatsink to keep the noise down. Also helps to decode FullHD video.

And to tie it all together:
  • Netgear 5 port Gigabit ethernet switch. Will allow much quicker network access for music, DVDs and recorded TV shows between the two computers.

So between all that hardware, we should have two very capable machines, for not very much money. And with Windows7 x64 loaded onto them both, performance should be pretty good. Plus, we'll be able to take advantage of all the new tricks that Win7 brings to the table, like Libraries, and HomeGroups.

So now the only thing I'm waiting on is for Windows7 RTM to be released via the MS VLK portal, and we'll be away! I'm hoping to be able to hook into this on Saturday afternoon, if everything goes in our favour. I certainly hope it does!