Episode 9 - Black Friday Shopping, $500 PC, Cheap GPS [Discussion]

[travislopes]

$500 PC: Parts. Black Friday Shopping Tips. Cheap GPS. Sidewalk Astronomy. HTPC Hardware for Blu-ray and HD DVD Movies, Your Fave $20 Headphones!

[suzq]

Thanks for the Black Friday tips--since I'm stuck at work, the only way I'm shopping today is online, lol! I look forward to Patrick building his $500 PC--I'll be curious to see what he winds up with! Everybody have a great weekend! :)

[rumblestrip]

Another great show, they keep getting better and better!

OK here is a question for Patrick, what about building the $500 PC so that you could also run OSX. There is a guy locally that is doing these and they are not using OSX86, but rather the real Apple disk.

http://detroit.craigslist.org/sys/486224554.html

Just a thought.

[technojunkie]

About the $500 PC segment: The ATI Radeon 2900 series Patrick mentioned has been made obsolete by the far more power efficient HD 3800 series. Plus, no more confusing XT vs. Pro vs. GT vs. GollyG or whatever, higher numbered cards are faster. A HD 3850 would be great for HTPCs, HDMI w/audio and very power efficient 55nm core. I have the HD 3870 and it's an amazing bargin, slightly faster than the old 2900XT yet half the price and half the power consumption. The HD 3850 would bust your $500 budget, though not by much, but it'd give you much better gaming options and improved HD video decompression support should you find the coin for that LG Blu-ray/HD-DVD combo drive.

[ilovetech4me]

yea this show has gotten a lot better in the last 3 episodes, especially this episode, but it doesn't beat TSS, or DL.TV with Patrick (I wish DL.TV was with Patrick and Roger)

but that said, I glad to see it has gotten better

I have found a lot of helpful or interesting things from this show.

[primeone]

what is up with the video quality this episode? the video is 238 mb for only a 30 min show and the video seems to be full of encoder artifacts and nasty motion loss artifacts.

to show here are some screen shots

http://www.geocities.com/rickroan/Picture2.png
http://www.geocities.com/rickroan/Picture3.png

[Ryudo]

^ it looked just fine on my end..like every week.

This was however the first ep I didn't keep,just seemed sorta boring.

[rowlodge]

i just threw away mine, not because they were no good but i wore them out, cost $24 a year ago not $12, should i get some more?

i wish jessica would stop pretending to be so dumb with computers, its getting old, how in the hell did she get this job much more at tech tv?

[keithnl]

... The HD 3850 would bust your $500 budget, though not by much, but it'd give you much better gaming options and improved HD video decompression support should you find the coin for that LG Blu-ray/HD-DVD combo drive.

Hey technojunkie thats exactly what I did, the HD 3850 kicked me up to the 600 buck mark.

I've needed to upgrade for a little while so when Patrick told me to upgrade I decided to listen :)

I ended up getting a different mother board which came as a bundle deal with the Intel Core 2 Duo E4400, and I didn't get any drives. Still managed to keep the upgrade to around the 600 Canadian dollar mark. Of course now I have buyers regret and feel like I might of screwed myself.


2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 $89.99
Mid Tower ATX Case Black $50.17

1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 and
1 x DFI B.I. P35-T2RL LGA775 $287.76

Radeon HD 3850 256MB $179.99
=======================================
Total: $607.91

[asala]

I couldn't find (in your show notes) what type of software was necessary for HD DVD and/or Blu-Ray playback. Will Microsoft's Windows Vista Media Center handle everything once the drives are installed?

How's performance compared to a dedicated HD-DVD or Blu-Ray set top box?

Thanks,

André

[AdamM]

I recently built a PC for $500 and was very surprised at the results. I wanted to experiment with MythTV and had a limited budget. By spending a little less on the CPU I was able to add a ATSC tuner to the mix. My build went like this:
ASUS P1-AH2 bare bones kit
2x1GB DDR2 800 RAM
Athlon 64 4200+ X2
500GB Hard Disk
Lite-On DVD-RW
Kworld ATSC/NTSC tuner.
The bare bones kit included a small black case, power supply, and motherboard with an Nvidia 6150 video adapter, GB Ethernet, and a sound card with optical out. Actually it was $485, a little over $500 shipped. The OS is Mythbuntu 64bit, a version of Ubuntu with MythTV and some tools pre-configured with the install. Plus I get a little better transcoding performance with the 64bit OS.

This is an awesome little DVR, media storage, and media playback device. I can record HD over the air, and playback 1080p video without issues.

As far as HD-DVD and Blue-Ray Stand-Alone players are the way to go. A copy of Cyberlink's PowerDVD (thats the software you need asala) and the Drive alone will cost you more than most standalone players. I know the first DVD player I owned was in a PC because the drive wasn't that expensive. I don't think we will see significantly cheaper Next Gen Optical Drives for a while yet.

[cemilkor]

Hey guys, great show as usual.

Don't forget the Nokia's original e61 (not the e61i) smartphone. Kick ass software, kick ass features. A little old by comparison but still, a good RIM/Palm alternative.

ck

[aabb]

I Hope Patrick has better luck getting perfomaces out of that kind of set up then I normally do. I find that I can never quite get ati boards to work well with Nvidia chipsets. anyone else have this problem?

[asala]

As far as HD-DVD and Blue-Ray Stand-Alone players are the way to go. A copy of Cyberlink's PowerDVD (thats the software you need asala) and the Drive alone will cost you more than most standalone players. I know the first DVD player I owned was in a PC because the drive wasn't that expensive. I don't think we will see significantly cheaper Next Gen Optical Drives for a while yet.

Thanks AdamM. It looks like PowerDVD Ultra is about $100. The one thing that makes it cool is that it brings HD discs into the unified Vista Media Center interface, which I really like.