Home Theaters

Up until now, I have kept up with the progress of the Home Theater PC, but resisted the temptation to build one. Several things have aligned recently to change my mind, and make serious perusal of the parts necessary to build one a priority.

  maybe not the performance king any longer, but very respectable

The demise of television programming of quality, the newest series of central processing units that are highly efficient, and the latest generation of motherboards that allow for a neat package that wraps high performance and low heat and noise all together in one great package all contribute to the push for a home theater PC.

AMD has been getting the brunt of comments lately that compare processing power, but still it is a company that knows how to produce a great processor for a price. Any of the low power X2 series of processors will make a great beginning for our machine. These are available in 45W, 65W, and 95W total thermal dissipation packages. Depending upon your needs, any of these will work - a good choice for 1080i resolution would be the X2-5000+ or greater. This will allow for other processes in the PC to complete in the background without causing jerking or other interruption of the program.

a Gigabit offering of the 780G chipset, a very good candidate for your HTPC

With the new series of 780G series motherboards, a big change has taken place. Up until now the user has had to choose between onboard graphics, which are less than spectacular, and an add-in  graphics solution, which takes lots of power, requiring a much larger power supply, and generate major amounts of heat, requiring lots of active cooling. For a gaming PC, it is no big deal to add a noisy fan to maintain the temperatures of the CPU and GPU, but in an HTPC, anything that makes noise is going to detract from the theater experience, and also compress the absolute dynamic range, as the fan noise raises the noise floor of the system. With the 780G series, a budget video card can be put into the graphics slot, and the onboard graphics can be used together to form a (since we’re talking about AMD only) Crossfire graphics solution. Lots of video processing power with very little noise and heat!

Another very nice thing about the 780G series motherboards is how dense the features have become. These microATX form factor boards have up to 12 USB ports, and many have Firewire as well, allowing for easy connection to a digital video source, such as a DV camera. Most of the boards have a gigabit Ethernet port, so streaming across a home network is easily done. Along with the x16 PCIe slot, the boards usually have a couple of PCI slots and a x1 PCIe slot. This will allow for a couple of television tuner cards, and possibly a wireless NIC, if needed.

the Ultra MicroFly makes a great HTPC case, and is good for LAN parties too!

All of this can be accommodated in a small case, allowing for a very easily placed package. My personal choice would be the Ultra MicroFly case, or perhaps one of the lookalikes, such as the Apevia XQ-Pack. The reason I mention the Ultra first is that it is 1.5" longer than the others of its type, and that allows for a full size power supply. The case will hold a couple of optical drives, a couple of hard drives, and either a media reader, a floppy, or a Zip drive.

high quality, major warranty, and little to no noise - what more could you want? The nuclear self powered PSU has not been invented yet, until then, PC Power is ‘da bomb’

A good choice of power supply would be a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 470, which will power all that can be put in the case, including a monster video card, should you decide that gaming is something else you want the HTPC to do.

Any good 20" LCD will make this HTPC worthy of doing almost any other computing chore when not showing showing movies or recording television programs. Marrying these pieces to Windows XP MCE will yield a very easily used computer with multiple personalities - which in computing terms is a good thing. On the other hand, using any of several flavors of Linux will allow for all that XP MCE does with the exception of playing some Windows-only games.

Have fun, I know I’m going to - the parts collecting begins now.

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