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Dave wrote: > Thanks Rob. > > I think I'll save some money then and stick at 2 Gig (I think memory runs > better these days when it is matched in size? e.g.. 2 x 1 Gig). > Well unless you're getting a top of the range Intel Core i7 then yes, dual channel (fitting matched memory in pairs) will improve performance. > Yes I was slightly concerned about the Power Consumption (I do try to be > green although slightly ignorant of the consumption of some of these chips) > but I am looking to make this a centre piece for watching TV, Playing Music > and Recording for all the rooms in the house as well as doing Home > Automation etc and figured I would need to use something quite powerful for > all those tasks running simultaneously. I will however look into the AMD > Chips (I've always liked AMD but felt they had dropped behind recently?). > Your tip about low consumption processors will come in useful when I spec > the Media Directors so thanks again for that. Not sure what the power consumption on Intel chips are like. I do know that the Pentium Dual Cores (which are based on Core 2, rather than the Pentium D which is based on the Pentium 4) don't use much power. For cooling I'd suggest a Zalman cooler. They're about £35 for an all copper one but they are very good (sharp fins though so beware when fitting). I'd say probably a dual core system will do you fine. If you go for AMD, get at least an AM2+ motherboard. That way you'll be able to upgrade it to a Phenom X3 or X4. > As regards TV I don't have Satellite so no HD just Standard Freeview and > DVD's.but I intended to have around 3 TV Cards for viewing and possibly > recording a couple of channels as well (I find the best programmes always > run at the same time and you miss one of them) so again figured the extra > horsepower would come in useful. Well Freeview cards capture MPEG2 streams anyway which are already compressed. The CPU horsepower comes in when it plays the video back (hence using NVidia cards which have motion compensation for MPEG2 video which eases the load on the main CPU) and transcoding (say from MPEG2 to xvid/MPEG4. I'm sure a dual core system with 2GB memory would probably be more than enough. Rob Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html