Building a PC (for those that do)

Just buy 'matched' RAM modules from Crucial?

In case I was misunderstood ... I know that USB2 at 480 Mbs exceeds Firewire 1394b ... but many digital camcorders had a Firewire interface. This was useful as you could use pass through ... feed VHS in and use the Firewire to provide DVI out to PC.

Maybe pass through to USB also exists ... not sure about that.

Assume they will migrate to USB3 and 5Gbs over the micro USB socket in the future.

Which Atom board comes without a GPU?

Motherboard makers will publish a list of tried and tested RAM configurations, and CPU models and steppings. Just buy stuff off the "approved" lists and you will be fine. (you will probably be fine if you don't!)

If you have a miniDV camera or similar, then yes...

(I also use it for analogue capture using a miniDV camera as a real time digitizer. Seems to get better results than the basic PC digitizers)

I use a miniDV. My antique laptop (dicky laptop) has a firewire port. If you need firewire on a desktop, ebay ~£3.

In message , Rick Hughes writes

So how important is write speed - if you have two drives, you just leave it to chug away while you go and do something else

It may have a GPU,. but nothing is connected to it :-)

...

A very large heat sink and low power and you can get away without any fans at all. Ideal for a machine in a domestic setting that only needs to deal with emails and the occasional bit of simple word processing.

Colin Bignell

Not quite bottomed out what RAM to use ... even just getting 2 x 8GB modules there is so much choice. I'm sure somewhere there is a spec that states MHz and latency required to suit MB and CPU, just not found it yet.

...

... and the Crucial web site has both a system scanner and an advisor tool to make choosing compatible memory simple.

The CPU won't last long without a heatsink on it... Intel's stock coolers are noisy whining things too!

Worth considering if you need a high power gamers graphics board as the Ivy bridge chipset can do respectable DVD playback and transcoding. If you intend to play games at hires then it is worth it but otherwise probably not. Money saved would get you a Blueray super multi RW.

Crucial have a tool on their site for deciding which modules to use. Just identify the motherboard and you'll be provided with a list and details of suitable modules.

Surely, it depends on overall price. You may find a supplier such as Chillblast.com have one at the same spec they'll sell you assembled and with a guarantee for not much more (Thats what I found anyway)

This one is similar to your spec but you can downgrade the Video card, add an SSD, remove Windows etc?

I'm going to use my Pi for that, just ordered a 64G USB stick for a drive. No fans,

I haven't seen any video to USB converters that work as well as my old canon DVI camera does S-video to firewire. If all you want is VHS quality then USB converters work OK. Its a lot easier to capture and edit DVI clips than anything compressed in MPEG1/2/4, I have done so on a 600 MHz Celeron machine before now. Encoding them to DVD is a bit slow on such a machine.

I would think that the solid state ones that you just take the card out will be the most popular.

You only see the builds with problems if you read the groups, they aren't very common IME.

If its £75 and the parts cost you the same its quite expensive. You can usually chose a "stock" build and add stuff cheaper than getting all the parts separately.

You may get more performance out of 4 x 4GB on some motherboards, something else to check.

well that is the problem. with the Pi.

needs a case, a power supply and and a SATA interface because 2TB of mirrored disk caint be done with flash