New
#11
Playing movies isn't like playing games. You don't need large amounts of onboard RAM because you're not filling the space with a bunch of extra textures, AA and AF... so while it sounds like it makes sense to have a lot of onboard RAM to play 1080p movies, that's really not how it works out.
My brother in law has a 42 inch 720p tv he uses with media center and an x800xl, with only 256MB onboard... playback is flawless, no matter what he throws at it. He's really into all this stuff and was explaining it to me over the xmas holiday... so much so that my eyes glazed over and rolled back into my head... and I'm usually ok with the geek-speak.
Anyway, he convinced me to build my own htpc, and I'm doing just that right now. It's actually quite amazing how little power they really require. You don't need a lot of cpu (i'm going to use an old athlon single core 3200, which is more than enough), and I'm tossing in a little $50.00 ATI. The only thing I really have to "worry" about is finding enough system RAM. I'm using an old board that uses regular old DDR, and as soon as I find another gig on ebay that's reasonably priced, I'm good to go.