I'm looking into building a media pc and space is kind of an issue in the case, it's not going to be anything big, just a pc for TV, DVD's, and music, so it'll have a mini itx mobo, TV card, dvd drive (maybe burner), and a 320 gig HD.

My question: would a 60 watt pico psu be able to handle the needs of the the mini itx board, 320 gig SATA HD, and a DVD drive/burner?

[EDIT]And before anyone asks, no, I don't know the draw of the hardware, but these are what I'm looking at:
mobo
hard drive
DVD drive/burner
[EDIT]

What's your processor going to pull?

Mini ITX is tiny...are you squeezing this into a cigar box or something? :p

The processor comes with the mobo, VIA C7 Nano. I can't find anything on it's power needs, but from what I can find, it seems that it's a low voltage processor. 3 of the 4 reviews on the PSU say it works pretty well too.

Keep in mind that a DVD burner uses more power than a regular DVD drive (not usually significant; a few watts at most, but definitely worth thinking about here). So unless you really see the need to burn DVDs with this thing, you might want to just get a standard no-frills DVD-ROM drive.

Ok, I've decided to nix the burner since I can just access the hard drive from a different computer and burn anything from there. Here's what I have so far.

Motherboard/CPU combo
1 GB RAM
60w PSU
320GB SATA Hard Drive
DVD-ROM Drive
Windows XP MCE 2005
TV Tuner Card/Remote

Total Cost: $554.09

I'm still a little worried about the power issue, but I think I should be ok since I don't have anything very power hungry in this setup.
I might even cut out windows media center edition if I can find a good linux distro that would work just as well.
Any suggestions welcomed.

MythTV seems to be the usual choice, if you want to go the Linux way. Haven't used it myself, so I don't know if it's in any way better or worse than Windows.

Thanks Impi. I'm gonna give that a try in the computer that I have the same TV card in tomorrow to make sure everything's compatible (mainly the remote, the MythTV wiki says it is, but I want to make sure beforehand)

You may have just saved me $115.

the peak power consumption of that processor is 20 Watts, for the 2Ghz version.

linky for processor info

So looking at the rest of the bits I'd say you should be fine.

When it comes to power, more is always better. If it were me, I'd try to cram as much power as I could fit into it. I can't imagine running a modern computer with just 60 watts.

I admit, I don't know a single thing about mini boards, but my PC has a 550 watt PSU in it.

I would look real closely at some benchmarks for that VIA C7 processor and make sure will perform the tasks you want it for. I havent tried the C7 but I do have some experience with the previous generation VIA C3, and those were barely powerful enough to handle DVD playback. A P3-500 mhz would beat the 1 ghz C3's in most benchmarks.

Also if you go the MythTV route, I would make sure it supports the hardware accellerated video playback of the intergrated video, you really dont want to be relying on that cpu for all the dvd decoding. It probably does, since thats a common motherboard for mini-itx systems.

I can almost guarantee you use about 30-60% at any given time of your 550watt PSU.

Well, you see, I don't have the space for a normal sized PSU. I don't want to have to take the psu apart to fit it in what I'm putting this in and I don't want a bunch of extra wires hanging around in the case, I will if I have to, but I'd rather have this thing look clean and utilize all the space I can. If the processor only pulls 20w at maximum, that leaves 40 for the mobo and drives. Ive looked at some other drives and the combined pull of a hard disk and dvd drive is between 15w and 25w. So at max that's right around 45w. I should be fine.



All I need it for is TV playback, DVD playback, and music. There are tons of projects on the mini itx website that do just what I want this to, so I hink it should work alright.



From what I've read in the MythTV docs it does support it, but it can have some problems with the chipset family the video uses. If worse comes to worse I can just get Windows MCE.

Bah, I want to do this, too. No $$$, though. I'd want wireless syncing between the computers, TVs, and box though.

Stormie, Vista home premium and up comes with a damned good media center package. Just turn the fancy visual crap off and you might be able to handle it.

I aready have Vista Ultimate on my other computer and i don't need another Vista machine, especially if all it's gonna be used for is TV. I'm not gonna waste extra money on Vista when I can get Windows MCE for almost 50 less (or linux for free). Not to mention this rig will barely have the specs for even the most minimum settings on any Vista release. It would be better to go with MCE or Linux.

I'll be buying the parts next week and I'll post pics when I get it built

Use Myth. Please.

That entirely depends on if it's compatible with all the hardware, but i'm planning on it as of right now.

Mythbuntu is an Ubuntu based distribution for MythTV.

The power supply should be fine.

It sounds like an interesting project, but personally I can't help but think it's waste of money if it doesn't have enough power to play h264 encoded video. I mean, if it's just dvd playback, any cheap dvd player can do it. Recording tv, a dvr. Buying both would still be cheaper (not to mention getting a box with both functions in). The only reason I'd see for a thing like this would be power and versatility enough to watch modern formats, and update when necessary.

But that's just me.

Well my 733mhz xbox can play h.264, so I don't think it would be a problem.