Media Center PC Buying Guide Part 1

Let's take a detailed look at each of the components that are needed to build a Media Center PC.

HTPC Case

You have a couple choices here for your media center case. The case is going to be the visible portion of your HTPC, so it's up to you how much you want it to blend with the rest of your home theater system. With that thought in mind, you can spend anywhere from $75 all the way up to $800 on the home theater PC case alone. It's all a matter of what you want and how you want it to look. I am trying to keep the costs down in this guide, so I am going with the Silverstone LC20 ATX Media Center case. It has everything you need for a media center PC, with plenty of room inside for everything. The only downside to this case is the single optical drive bay. For this build, it is not a problem, but if you need to have multiple optical drives, then you may want to look at another case..

CPU

AMD recently released their latest Athlon X2 processor, the 4850e. This is a very efficient CPU running at 2.5GHz per core. The price on the 4850e is very reasonable and that, combined with the lower power usage of the chip, makes it a nice choice for a Media Center PC.

Motherboard

This was an easy choice - the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H will pair very nicely with the AMD processor. This board was made for HTPC's and is very stable. This board uses the new 780G chipset, which has full hardware decode acceleration for H.264, VC1, and MPEG-2. Seeing as how decoding is one thing that can really slow down an HTPC, this will really help keep things smooth.

Power Supply

Seeing as how a Media Center PC has the potential to be an always on computer, I wanted a very efficient power supply. I went with the Antec Earthwatts EA380 Power Supply. This power supply is 80 PLUS certified, and will provide plenty of power for the system, while at the same time running cool and quiet.

System Memory

Memory is cheap these days, so recommending 2GB was an easy decision. Patriot 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 will do the trick nicely. This will give us a bit of memory to spare if you go with Windows Media Center, but will be needed if you go with Vista.

CPU Heatsink

I wanted to find a heatsink that can be run without a fan to help keep the noise level down. Since it is pretty useless to overclock an HTPC, this was not to difficult. The Cooler MasterGeminII RR-CCH-ANU2-GP was made to run fanless and still keep your processor running nice and cool.

Part 2 Is Up Next...

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