Build a machine that has:
* Good desktop performance
* Long life through upgradability
* Cost close to $1,000
The SilverStone LC17 is the base, $140. Added a multi-card reader and USB port, $9. Chose an Antec's NeoHE 430 430W high efficiency power supply to power the system, $86. M0b0 is the Foxconn 955X7AA-8EKRS2 motherboard Intel's 955X north bridge sporting an 800 or 1066 MHz front side bus with the LGA 775 socket meaning you can upgrade to a dual-core Extreme Edition CPU once the price drops. The south bridge is Intel's ICH7R which provides 8-channel sound through the board's analog connectors and also through the digital coax and optical connectors. Up to 8GB of DDR2 memory in 667MHz dual-channel slots, and features 2 PATA, 4 SATA, and 4 SATAII connectors with built in RAID controllers for all. The board also has headers for 2 1394a and 1 1394b port & 8 USB ports, $183. Pr0c is a Intel Pentium 4 630 at 3.0GHz, $171. 2 x 1GB DDR2 Mushkin 2GB dual channel kit, $200. Optical drive is a OEM Sony DVD burner, $40. Hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB SATAII, $100. The Leadtek WinFast PX6200 TC for graphics card. We don't use our desktops for gaming so we went really cheap, $59. The final component added was the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE dual-tuner card. The card has MPEG2 hardware encoders built-in so there will be almost no load on the CPU when recording. Hauppauge cards also have good support for Linux, $138. The total for the base system is $1126. Run MythTV on top of a Gentoo Linux, by following the MythTV install instructions on the wiki. Also set aside some partitions to try Windows XP MCE and OSx86.



Case


Multi-card reader


Power Supply


M0B0


Pr0c


RAM


DVD-Burner


Hard Drive


VidCard