Medion as HTPC

falteringstar

Hi Guys

Im thinking of getting one of these http://www.aldi.ie/special_buys/product_132.html and Im wondering if these are generally good as a HTPC?

mathias

It will do the job nicely ,( if not a little bit of overkill ) but there are a few things that you might want to change , the graphics are fine as they are passively cooled , so no noise there ,but it doesnt say anything about how the processor is cooled and this can be very noisy , thats not nice in a HTPC so could be a problem ,

1GB of memory is not " Huge " When your talking about Vista , its a bare minimum. Id throw an extra 1GB in there.

The TV tuner needs to be a Dual Tuner for it to record one channel while watching another , it doesnt say this , it just says 3 in one , and the Digital tuners ( DVB etc.) are useless in this country as there is no FTA digital broadcast yet.

This part ,

Gaming – gaming packs more punch for every level of player with Windows Vista™. Rich parental controls and jaw-dropping 3D graphics makes it easier to install, find and play your favourite games.

is an out and out lie , games will run in Vista close to XP performance with the right drivers , some old games will not work at all , but no way do they run any better!

And last but not least , that type of case is not going to look well beside your TV , might not bother you but for me I would want a proper HTPC case , something like this ,

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=322568

MAJJ

Hi falteringstar,

I have the previous version almost identical. I thought it was good value at the time. It's very well put together and I do like it and have had zero problems since I got it. Worked straight out of the box. I haven't used it to it's potential yet.

The things that I don't like :

it comes in a large tower case and has a bay for a proprietary hd on top. So in my opinion doesn't really belong in the living room.

it's pretty quite except for the hard disk which can be a little noisy.

the bios advanced features are locked so no overclocking.

As I said what your about to buy is what I have except for the increase in processer, vista being preinstalled and the memory coming in a single unit.

Feel free to ask specifics.

Cheers,
MAJJ

8T8

mathias wrote:

is an out and out lie , games will run in Vista close to XP performance with the right drivers , some old games will not work at all , but no way do they run any better!

That is not exactly 100% correct or incorrect, while most games will run the same speed as XP given further maturity of the drivers there are some cases were it will run faster under Vista only by a small amount because of the lower latency of the Vista driver model.

Anyway falteringstar as everyone has pointed out the spec are fairly decent and will do the job.

MAJJ

Just to follow up on mathias' points :

the processor is passively cooled the only fan is on the PSU and isn't too noisy. The noise comes from the h/d instead

the tuner is a hybrid analogue/DVB-S/DVB-T - but only one thing can be recorded at a time.

FunkyDa

If the OP is in north Kildare, he may well be able to pick up the digital TV broadcasting from Three Rock, with the DVB-T element of the hybrid card. If he has clear line of sight to the sky, towards the East& South, he can receive lots of free to air broadcasting, with the DVB-S element.