Sound & Vision magazine is building their own HTPC. I am a regular subscriber to Sound & Vision magazine, and every once and a while I also head over to their website to see some of the latest featured custom home theaters on their website, if you are into custom home theaters go check them out. While on the site I saw a new post about the DIY HTPC they were building. My first thought was, it is about time, I have been running a HTPC for years now, and I am also an avid Home Theater nut as well so when I saw a main stream publication/site doing a write up about a HTPC it really got me excited.
The goal of the author of the article was to build a custom, DIY, HTPC, and build it for less than the cost of a mac mini. Starting off the author listed all of the parts from HTPC case, to motherboard, to cpu, ram and hard drive. What I liked about the build was he ended up choosing the same HTPC I had just recently purchased and reviewed. As pointed out the HTPC case is a great bang for the buck, for under $50 you can’t go wrong with the HEC 7K09 case. As far are the rest of the components go, I am a little hesitant to recommend a non-name brand mobo, I would have chosen a gigabyte, MSI, or Asus mobo rather than the Jetway motherboard that was chosen. For the cpu, for about $15 more you can bump up to the 5050e which gives you a few more mhz in speed, and still retains the 45watt power usage, which seems to be the best bang for the buck AMD cpu right now.
Tuner card chosen was a great choice, I am a huge fan of Avermedia products. I have probably had more Avermedia Tuner cards over the years and each one of them keep on working great. I currently am running two Avermedia M780 ATSC/NTSC combo tuner cards and they were flawlessly in Vista as well as 7MC. As far as the remote control I would have chosen an IR based remote control. If you are a true home theater or AV nerd, you would be running some form of a universal remote control, and because of that, you would probably want to use the same universal remote control to take control of your newly built HTPC, and with an RF based solution there wouldn’t be a way to do that.
Operating system wise, I’d say spend the money and get Vista, and use media center, or hop on the Windows 7 beta testing and get to use a great operating system, with an even better media user interface for free. Nothing can beat the ease of use, and the pure eye candy you get with media center. Over all though a HTPC isn’t a HTPC unless it has a nice, easy to use, 10 foot interface, so whatever you go with, make sure you have some form of a gui that you can control with a remote, nothing beats sitting back on your couch, using a great HTPC system and not have a mouse or keyboard in your way.
In the end it was a great write up, pointed out some good choices for HTPC parts, and went into detail on why each part was chosen. Over all it was great exposure for the HTPC community as a whole and I would love to see more articles like this.
