Hello Guys, Just came across this site and love it, lots of info and it seems like alot of people know there stuff around here..so i decided to ask some questions about my personal setup and what would be the BEST option for me I was thinking about setting up a MCE Media Server that has all my media (pics,DVDs, movies,videos & music), and add 3 powerful HTPCs for the home theater, game room, and family room. I currently have a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server that I plan to use as the media server. It has Intel Dual Core Xeon 5050 2x2MB Cache 3.00GHZ processor, 2GB memory, PERC5/i Integrated Controller Card, two 80GB hard drive. My main goal is that i want to have all the HTPCs to access the server, and play movie/music. Also, each HTPC will be able to record the Dish program and save it to the server. Each HTPC can play standard DVD, and blue ray DVD. My budget is 10K. I want to spend some $ to upgrade the server first, get more hard drives (3 - 5 TB). then use the rest to build 3 HTPCs. So, please let me what do you think it's the best setup. (1) Case? desktop style, not tower, need to be mounted in the rack (2)CPU/Memory/Motherboard? (3)Drives, storage space ??? (4)Remote control/access to the HTPC (5)Capture Device? (6)Video Card with HDMI output? (7)Audio? (8)Any other cards? (9)OS? (10)HTPC software? Thank you for reading
