Some people have been asking for more details about my replacement Xbox PC. Partly because they want to build there own or find something similar in the near future. So to be clear… Its a Compaq Evo D510 SFF (small form factor)
- Pentium 4 Processor running at 2.8ghz
- 512meg of DDR Memory
- 20Gig Samsung UDMA drive
- 4 USBs
- SoundBlaster 5.1 Live PCI card added
- Bluetooth Dongle
- 5X DVD Drive
- Integrated onboard Intel Graphics
- On-board 10/100 Lan
- Ubuntu 8.04
I've look at graphics cards to replace the onboard graphics and decided to get a low profile GeForce AGP card. But there hard to find and quite costly. So instead I'm ordering a PCI GeForce card which will use up the last PCI slot I have. I replaced the CD ROM drive with my first ever DVD ROM drive (11 years I've had the drive now), its also one of the first drives which I made region free. So region coding should never be a problem ever. The Soundblaster card I put in because I'm hoping theres more chance of getting AC3 sound out of its dedicated SPDIF that the on board sound. However I've found few people running them in there XBMC setups. 512meg of Ram and 20gig hd is over kill for just a XBMC box, but I'm considering dropping the hard drive for Flash in the future. Oh can I also say, currently my EVO box is quieter that my current XBOX. Actually its so quiet, I can't hear it at all unless I'm close to it.
Next steps, get wireless remote or keyboard and mouse. Fix the resolution of Ubuntu (currently set to native rez of the screen 1366×768 instead of the more fitting 1280×720). Use my new HDMI to DVI cable instead of the VGA cable and sort out true AC3 sound using the Soundblaster or onboard intel soundcard.
