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Originally Posted by User Name
Just saw this, looks like it would be a great piece of hardware for a home theatre PC. You can get a blu-ray drive etc all in there for around $400. Depends on what upgrades you need... I was wondering what everyone though would be a good amount of ram to playback 1080p HD? 4 gigs? I'm generally not a fan of dell, but this looks pretty sweet.
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I can't find these anywhere on the Canadian Dell site, and the only ones I see on the US site have very lousy starting specs. AMD procs, low-end graphics and none of them have Blu-Ray.
Edit: I took the cheapest one they have on the US site and upgraded the important stuff.
Base Model ($229)
- Upgraded the processor (important for HD movies) ($110)
- Upgraded the OS from Vista Basic to 7 Home Premium ($30)
- Upgraded the RAM (important for Windows) ($70)
- Added Blu-Ray ($100)
- Upgraded the video card (obviously important for HD movies) ($75)
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SYSTEM COLOR Piano Black
PROCESSOR AMD Dual Core Athlon™ Neo X2 6850e (1MB L2, 1.8GHz)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
WARRANTY AND SERVICE 1 Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis - Important Information
SECURITY SOFTWARE McAfee SecurityCenter, 30-Day Trial
MONITOR No Monitor
MEMORY 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz- 2 DIMM
HARD DRIVE 250GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
OPTICAL DRIVE Blu-ray Disc (BD) Combo (Reads BD and Writes to DVD/CD)
VIDEO CARD ATI Radeon HD 4330 512 MB
SOUND Integrated 2.1 High Definition Audio
KEYBOARD Dell USB Entry Keyboard
MOUSE Dell USB Optical Mouse
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Total comes to $614US without shipping. It's actually $676 when you factor current exchange rate and GST. The only catch to that math is that Dell never uses exchange rates. I'd be willing to bet this same config would run about $800 on the Canadian site. Since the US site won't ship to Canadians, we're stuck waiting for stuff to hit the Canadian site and then paying their "Non-American Tax."
All in all, it really sucks that Apple refuses to add Blu-Ray to their products. The Mac Mini with a Blu-Ray drive would be perfect. The HDMI port is arguable, since the Mini DisplayPort + Optical cable works just as well.
I guess I'm stuck still using my PS3 for media center goodness.
