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I bought that MS MCE keyboard and had to send it back. The mouse on it totally sucks.
I bought an IOGear keyboard with a built in track ball and it works great. Works great at distance. Looks nice. Track ball works well...
The onboard video should be able to handle 1080p with ease. How long is the HDMI cable you ran to your basement? Anything over 50 feet will require a signal booster.
If you are dead set on a new card then you can get a ATI 4350 to a 4670 for under a $100 if you really want to get a new...
These work pretty well and are fairly cheap if you are too lazy to re pin your molex connectors. Fry's carries them for $6.99.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118217&cm_re=fanmate-_-35-118-217-_-Product
They come with extra long cables too
If you really interested in ripping blu rays then I would suggest using a quad core processor and some big ass HDD's. Ripping blu rays is CPU intensive and takes up a butt load of space. Or you could offload both those functions onto a workstation and file server and go with a low power budget...
Sorry to post this here but I don't have enough posts to post to the deal forum.
Newegg has a fairly nice combo deal on the parts for a HTPC.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.304688
1. Compucase 8K01BBA20:$49.99
2. Zotac...
Here are some standard combos for HTPCs. Intel will run you a bit more money.
AMD:
ASUS M3N78-VM
AMD Athlon II X2 240
Intel:
ZOTAC GF9300-G-E (mini-itx) or Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H
Intel Pentium E5300
The 9300 chipset boards are getting harder to find, the GA-E7AUM-DS2H may be limited...
It is hard to tell sometimes. On the low end receivers the manufacturers try to disguise the fact the receivers only do video pass through so you have to read between the lines. Any receiver that supports DTS-HD Master, DTS-HD High Resolution, Dolby TrueHD will do audio pass through on the...
Only HDMI supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. If you are planning on buying a blu ray player or a PS3 then you want use HDMI and not optical/coax.
I am not sure of your budget. You want to get a solid receiver though as it is the core of your home theater system. It's your call. You can...
The problem with the cheaper HTIBs (like the one you linked) and receivers is that they do not pass audio through the HDMI to receiver. You really want this feature. If you don't have HDMI audio pass through then you have to run an optical cable to the receiver and you lose sound quality.