Hi,

Looking to attempt to build myself a media centre machine using knoppmyth and have specced out a machine for myself bar a hard drive and video card. Now i know that people have said dont use a SATA drive as your boot device and that ATI cards are almost impossible to get working. So my questions are

1) Is it worth me having 2 hard drives (1 PATA with a smallish capacity and 1 SATA with a large capacity) in my set up or just worth buying 1 PATA drive? I ask this as im not sure if a PATA would be able to handle recording live TV due to its lower transfer speeds.

2) Realistically do i need to buy a video card at all, can i just get away with the on board outputs? If i do have to buy a card i am assuming i should get an NVDIA one, but how much should i look to spend. I dont want anything uber special, just something which can handle TV and DVD.

Would be grateful for any help on this as my project to get this built is stalling at the moment.

Many thanks

Rob

1) PATA is more than fast enough if you have working DMA, as almost all modern IDE controllers do. Someone here worked out that it was about 20 times faster than needed for a NTSC or PAL stream. This leaves plenty of head room for even HDTV.

2) Onboard video works okay if it's one of the better supported types like nVidia, SiS, or ATi.

Thanks for the info on SATA/PATA drives. What about the video though, the motherboard ill be using will be has an SiS graphics controller onboard but id like to keep my computer running as smoothly as possible, so while you say its ok to use the onboard does this mean its sufficient or just ok (e.g. that it will become flakey from time to time).