building from scratch around ceton infinitv 4 card

500 – 700. You might look into this.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.513520&cm_sp=DailyDeal-_-513520-_-Combo

Then sell the tuner if you don’t want it and the money towards a BD drive. I’ve seen BD drives for as low as 40 bucks and some change, might as well get one and you will still be under budget. Either way I think you can get everything you need for less than 7 easily. I think the Ceton tuner has a 3gb ram min so you might as well get 2x2Gb sticks. I am running 4 tuners now and feeding 3 XBOX 360s.

AMD 620 Propus
Gigabyte 780G series board
4Gb ram
Kingston SSD for OS
2x250Gb drives in Raid 0 for Recorded TV (Only because I had a few laying around)
Silverstone LC17 Case (Overkill but I have a future plan of making this my next WHSVail) box.
An Intel NIC, onboard NICs tend to offload processing to the system and that was causing me issues.

I had a tri core 720 in the system before that worked well and I imagine you could use any of the 45watt dual core AMD processors.

You really don’t need too much CPU power these days in a HTPC.  A basic system can be built with an AMD 785G motherboard and a dual core 45W CPU.  I’d probably go with the dual core to keep the power and heat down, but a tri or quad are fine choices as well.  Remember, you can always upgrade later if you decide you really need the extra CPU power.

I like the Antec NSK 2480 case since it comes with a nice power supply. 

2GB of ram is enough, but I don’t build without 4GB anymore.  Especially since the really cheap motherboards I like to build with sometimes only support 2 slots for RAM.

A SSD is overkill, and 2TB drives are $100 now.

I don’t expect you really need to spend much more than $400 right now on a HTPC and other than a better video card, I don’t see much reason to spend more than that.  But, with the AMD 6XXX series coming soon, I’m hoping that AMD’s lowest end and lowest power card will finally be a good HTPC performer.  The 5450 isn’t much of an upgrade over the 785G.  The AMD 5570 is the go to card right now if you want more than the 785G.

If I wanted a new motheboard that has more PCIe slots, can I use my AMD A64 x2 4850e AM2 CPU in a newer AM3 motherboard?

Consumer Electronics device.  i.e. Standalone Blu-ray player, Comcast STB, …

[quote=”ruwackd”]
[quote=”xjboonie”]
If I wanted a new motheboard that has more PCIe slots, can I use my AMD A64 x2 4850e AM2 CPU in a newer AM3 motherboard?
[/quote]
Unfortunately no.  The backward compatability AMD provides allows AM3 CPUs to be used in AM2 motherboards, not AM2 CPUs in AM3 motherboards.
[/quote]
The bottom line is that there are motherboards out there that will accommodate both AM2 and AM3 CPUs.  I have an MSI K9A2 Platinum mobo that originally could use only AM2 or AM2+ CPUs.  A BIOS update allowed it to work with AM3 CPUs as well.  You’ll just have to look at the CPU compatibility chart for a given motherboard to see if your CPU will work with it.  AMD CPUs are dirt cheap these days so rather than drive yourself nuts looking for a motherboard that’s most likely out of production, you can buy a newer board and CPU for an extra $50, give or take.

[quote=”Meester.Rip”]
I would think you could buy a AM2+ board, proc and DDR2 pretty cheap whether it be used, refurbished or a cheap combo deal. 1080P isn’t going change like video games as far as graphics hardware goes. If it runs today then it should run several years from now. Unless the pockets are deep.

The only thing I would definitely change on my future main HTPC builds would be to use an ATX board. More options, e.g. more tuners, a 3d capable video card (if there needs to be such a thing), more sata ports (should it get moved to a server).
[/quote]

I think MATX is perfectly suitable.  Just make sure you have things like firewire onboard if you think you will need it.  I use it to change channels on my cable box.

I would go with AM3 since DDR2 will only get more expensive.  AM3 will be more upgradable.  But, you are are wanting to upgrade a board, and Athlon X2 will fit in a AM2+ board.  From what I’ve heard though, it hurts the onboard graphics/video performance because you step back to HT2.0 instead of HT3.0 on the new chips.

If you go microATX with a separate video card, make sure the that the ordering of the PCI slots make sense. A quiet video card will often have either a large heat sink or a large fan which blocks the adjacent PCI slot. So plan on not having access to that slot and then make sure that you can still support the add-on cards you have planned.