Vista 64 Bit - Media Centre & support

[Guest hardergm]

Folks

I have Topfield PVR and it is brilliant albeit getting long in the tooth and

would like to replicate its functionality and more in a appropriately

provisioned workstation. Given that the Intel Penryn Quad core processors

are now available, and the price of 1TB HDDs are falling, its time to jump

into a a media centre workstation (I also want to use it for normal computing

functions (Office, Project, Visio etc). I'd like to use Vista in its 64 bit

mode to overcome the addressing limitations.

I am in Australia and we use PAL-B as the television standard and have a

myriad of standards for what is called Standard definitiona nd high

definition digital TV.

I want to use the Intel Q9450 or Q9550 processors for plenty of grunt and

headroom - the rest is a greenfield site.

I'm looking for recommendations for motherboards that are best suited to the

processors and media centre (and to future proof as much as possible);

RAIDed terrabyte HDDs - OK on the motherboard or better to have a separate

controller; Graphics cards (not a gamer but want good output from the media

centre); TV cards (the Topfield can record two channels and playback another

at the same time - it'd be nice to be able to record more channels than the

two (out here programs never run according to the published schedule!) - it

that now possible given the extra processing power of the Quad core

processors; and any other recommendations that you'd like to make.

I'm also interested in any othe potential 'gotchas' that I should be looking

out for - drivers seem to be the thing that scares most people off

Looking forward to the collective wisdom

 

Cheers

Geoff