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Home Theater PC
Filed Under (Hardware) by tech989 on 31-10-2008
The time has come for Home Theater PCs (HTPC) to move into prime-time as we discussed today on my weekly radio spot with Jim and Matt.
Good affordable PC components are readily available, hard drive space is affordable, internet bandwidth is substantial and reasonably priced, the new media-center-capable operating systems are user friendly, and there is loads of content available for download and streaming. There are a lot of possible configurations when building a HTPC, so work with a knowledgeable sales person to get the configuration that best suits your needs. This is not a comprehensive guide but here are some things to consider:
Case and power supply
To get started it is best to pick a good HTPC Case. It will most likely sit in your living room so you will want a quiet case that will also look good next to your HiFi equipment. A lot of the noise from a PC comes from the rotation speed of the cooling fans. Look for large fans (120 – 150 mm). They move more air at lower RPM than small fans (60 – 80 mm) so they are much quieter. The new Fusion Black 430 from Antec is a good case choice . It is handsome, smallish, accepts micro ATX motherboards, and comes with a power supply and a built in IR receiver for use with a remote control. You can fit in a couple of hard-drives, a video card and a TV tuner. If you want room for more components, or room to expand later, consider a full ATX case like the Fusion Remote Max, which has room for 4 internal hard drives, a couple of video cards and TV tuners. The Fusion Remote Mx is about $250 and comes with a remote but no power supply. You can also check out the cases by Thermaltake and Silverstone.
Hard Drives
You’ll probably want a lot of disc space to store your media and have it conveniently accessible. A One-Terabyte hard drive is a good start, and they can be found for about $145 at Canada Computers (an excellent source for all of your computer parts). A Terabyte (TB) equals 1000 GB.
Motherboard considerations
Look for digital audio inputs/outputs and DVI in addition to VGA on the motherboard. Motherboards with on-board RAID (a RAID system, which will be discussed in a future blog entry, can tolerate the loss of one hard drive without losing any data) are quite affordable and will provide your first level of back-up. RAID systems can also fail, and they do not protect you from user error or from the effects of a corrupted Master File Table, so you must back-up your files to another independent storage device on a regular basis. It may sound onerous, but this can be automated and it is far better than losing all those files that you spend so much time and money collecting. Although on-board RAID 1 is cheap, some people may prefer a non-RAID HTPC which backs-up to a RAID Network Attached Storage (NAS).
CPU and RAM
You must select a CPU that is compatible with your motherboard. A dual-core 2.4 GHz processor will do a fine job. Use at least 2 GB of RAM. Add more RAM to speed-up your PC if you intend to multi-task on this machine. If you are using a 64-bit version of Vista, you can install as much RAM as you want. I love RAM, so I would go with 8 GB.
Operating Systems
Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate both come with very good integrated media center capabilities, and both are available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. I recommend the 64-bit versions which support lots of RAM, run faster, and future development will be concentrated in the 64-bit environment. Vista Home Premium is an economical choice for regular users, whereas advanced users may appreciate the additional features of Vista Ultimate.
Other components
You can add a TV tuner, connect it to an external antenna and receive free digital TV. TV tuners are available from Hauppauge, ATI, and others.
You can add a Blue-Ray drive for as little as $150 or go with a standard DVD writer for $35.
Now you need to … plug-in … and have fun.
Good Reference Links
I’ll be adding some links to good HTPC sites soon, so check back later.