Suggestions for building HTPC & HDTV for friend

[MustangSVT]

Hey all. I'm going to be helping a friend of mine with making a multimedia PC for a friend soon and need to help him pick out a HDTV for his place as well to go with the PC. At the moment, I'm trying to d a bit of preliminary research to find out what direction I should be going. Here's a few questions for now. Note that this PC should be able to play modern games as well. He's not gonna be playing games often at all, but he might play a game or two from time to time and he'd like them to run well.

HDTVs
- LCD vs Plasma vs LED? which one is better
- what exactly is LED? does it just mean LED-backlist LCD? is it worth the extra money?
- 60 Hz vs 120 Hz? I know the TVs are not actually 120 Hz input so is it really worth it
- native display mode? what's it mean. I've seen that term used around here


HTPC
- ATI vs nVIDIA? which one has better HDTV output/options, which one has better video playback acceleration?
- if I go with AMD, AM2+ mobo or AM3? don't really know what the difference between the two is


For now, my ideas for HDTV are getting him a Sharp or LG 42" 1080p LCD and my ideas for HTPC are to make him a Core i5 or AMD Phenom build, whichever one is better value for the money, with 4GB of DDR3, and an ATI 4850 or 4870 video card or an nVIDIA GTX 260.

[nekrosoft13]

as far as ati vs nvidia is concerned, you probably will do onboard video which is fine.

ati boards with chipset 760-790 only do stereo PCM over HDMI
ati boards with chipset 785 will do either 5.1 or 7.1 PCM over HDMI
nvidia cards with 8200 (amd) or 9300/9400 (intel) will do 7.1 PCM over HDMI

so that is important, i made a mitake of going with 780 board for my HTPC, was considering replacing it for 785 board

as far as AM2+ and AM3 are concerned AM2 is DDR2 and AM3 is DDR3.

most AM2+ are foreward compatible with AM3 chips, but some AMD3 boards are not backwards compatible with AM2+ chips.

[MustangSVT]

Hi nekrosoft, thanks for answering. As far as onboard video, the PC should have the ability to play games well. It doesn't have to be bleeding edge (SLI, CrossFire, HD 58xx etc.), but I want to put in at least a 4850 in there. It should have the ability to play say Mass Effect or Assasin's Creed at 1080p ideally. I know that the ATI cards (48xx) have DVI-HDMI adapter that comes in the box and supposedly I can do 5.1 audio over that.

[mullet]

Originally Posted by nekrosoft13

as far as ati vs nvidia is concerned, you probably will do onboard video which is fine.

ati boards with chipset 760-790 only do stereo PCM over HDMI
ati boards with chipset 785 will do either 5.1 or 7.1 PCM over HDMI
nvidia cards with 8200 (amd) or 9300/9400 (intel) will do 7.1 PCM over HDMI

so that is important, i made a mitake of going with 780 board for my HTPC, was considering replacing it for 785 board

as far as AM2+ and AM3 are concerned AM2 is DDR2 and AM3 is DDR3.

most AM2+ are foreward compatible with AM3 chips, but some AMD3 boards are not backwards compatible with AM2+ chips.

Why not just get a 4670 1GB for $64.00 and be done not to mention getting system memory back.

OR a 4670 1GB for $39.99!!!!Expires 10/25/09

[nekrosoft13]

Originally Posted by mullet

Why not just get a 4670 1GB for $64.00 and be done not to mention getting system memory back.

OR a 4670 1GB for $39.99!!!!Expires 10/25/09

i might do that, thanks for links

[mullet]

Originally Posted by nekrosoft13

i might do that, thanks for links

Any time, I will say it is a bit overkill for Blu-Ray but it is smooth.

[MustangSVT]

Originally Posted by mullet

Why not just get a 4670 1GB for $64.00 and be done not to mention getting system memory back.

OR a 4670 1GB for $39.99!!!!Expires 10/25/09

Hi mullet. Me and my friend live in Canada, not United States, so we cannot order off any of those websites. Like I said in my last post, the video card for my friend's HTPC should handle some gaming at 1080p in games like Mass Effect, so I'm thinking either a GTX 260 or HD 4870 since both of these seem to be on sale lately.

[mullet]

Both should be a good choice dude.