Media Centre Musings Part two

I talked about my Media Centre beginnings a couple of days ago and well...I just havent been happy with my machine. You see it only has a Pentium III 733 in it and an old Nvidia GeForce 2 card in it and well - HDTV just didnt happen on it. SDTV had enough trouble. Cant have that...and (no surprise really) I found my Media Centre getting really proc bound. So today I lashed out and spent the money on getting rid of the bottleneck. Im buying:

• ABIT AV8 Socket 939 Athlon 64 motherboard and 512 MB RAM
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Processor
• ATI Radeon 9550 256 MB AGP card

I think that should make it sing - but I hear you say, "why is he buying a 64 bit proc when Media Centre only ships as 32bit"....Im buying for the next OS when it probably will work :) I would have liked to use PCIe but the budget wouldnt let me do it - so I compensated by getting a video card with more RAM on it to prevent a bottleneck occurring...

Will report the success on Monday when its built and done :)

• Anonymous
  September 16, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  September 19, 2005
  Hi Michael
  
  What remote and IR receiver are you using ? if any. The MSFT one ? how did you get it if you build your own MCE ?
• Anonymous
  October 10, 2005
  I dont think you can get MCE extenders here in AU - they have them in the US. Try the CompUSA website at http://www.compusa.com and see. They have the Xbox ones but be aware that the XBOX MCE extender is only available on the US XBOX as it use NTSC.
• Anonymous
  October 10, 2005
  You can get the MCE remote from AusPCmarket at http://www.auspcmarket.com.au. Software comes either OEM or MSDN/Action Pack subscriptions.