Recomend me something

[crashwg]

I was going to post this on byopvr but I figgure that the emulation would be more of a load on a system and this board is more centered on that aspect of PCs and processing power.

Ok, so I'm in the early stages of plaing my own PVR/Emulation Station and I'm wondering what hardware I should get...

I'm planing on using SilverStone LC03 as the case so full ATX is quite doable and prefered becuase I want the options of adding more PCI cards later on if need be vs. mini or micro which only have 1 or 2 pci/agp slots.

The unit will be used for recording and playback of video eventually with a dual tuner setup I'm thinking...  It will also have emulators of everything from Atari to N64 and maybe PS1 if I can figure it out.

I'm thinking about hooking the PC up to my stereo via S/PDIF aka. optical digital audio so a Motherboard with that built in would be great!

Also a large and fast HD would be good.  Should I go SATA?  I don't know much about the differences in interfaces of that type...    

So what do you all think?  Why motherboard?  CPU?  I'm thinking somewhere in the 2ghz range...  Video card?  It's gotta have S-VID!

What brand of motherboard was it that you can have custom boot screens on?  Does it meet any of the chriteria?

I guess that's all I've got for now...

Oooh, a hardware MPEG decoder would be sweet...

[shmokes]

Seriously consider buying a prebuilt Windows Media Center.  Windows XP Media Center 2005 has some really nice features and often it costs just as much to build your own as it would cost to get one premanufactured.  Granted, you have less control over the hardware, but a lot of companies that build official media centers offer a pretty high degree of customizability.  You also avoid some of the headache that nearly always goes on when building your own PC where two or more components just don't seem to want to play well together.  It's also nice to have a single point of contact for all warranty related issues that may arise.

If you decide to build your own afterall check out this full-size case.  It's the Cooler Master CAvalier 2.  IT's really nice looking, is full-size, so you can put in a full array of PCI cards and such, and is horizontal so would fit in nicely with your other home theater components.

Also check out www.snapstream.com .   They have a few products, namely Beyond TV, Beyond Media and the Firefly Remote that look excellent.  Snapstream has been doing the PC based PVR stuff longer than just about anybody and their products are reviewed very well from what I've seen.