atchleyfam.com and naasen.org

It’s that exciting time every 2 years when I put together another PC. The goal in this one is to build a Home Theater PC. I won’t be running windows media center or even Vista media center, but the goal is to play high-def content on my TV. The TV in this case is a 46″ 1920 x 1080 LCD with a 60hz refresh. The best solution for non High def content is Xbox Media Center on a hacked Xbox 1. The Xbox 1 CPU isn’t exactly up to task at playing anything using h.264 or Xvid at anything higher than 540p or hr.hdtv (in scene parlance).

First I had to settle on a mid-tower case that was quiet, could be closed and locked (I have kids remember and this is going in the living room), cheap, and looked dull enough to not draw too much attention to itself. Considering the built-in 500w power supply, I decided to go with the antec Sonata III. It’s marketed as being quiet, has easy access to the internals via a locking side panel, and most importantly has a locking front panel. I was really hoping for something that had a side CPU duct, but couldn’t find the combination of price, locking front panel, and side duct. It’s a bonus that the case looks almost identical to our speakers.

The CPU is the next part of our build, and thankfully the new 45nm process Intel Core 2 Duos are out… In fact they’re sold out at most places online. There are a few online retailers that have them in stock but they’re marked up 50-60 bucks. Luckily Fry’s has them behind the counter. $225 for a 3.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 6mb L2 cache. Sweet deal if I must say so. I’m going with the stock cooler for now, unless I find it makes too much noise. I don’t really plan on doing much overclocking so it shouldn’t be an issue.

For the motherboard I chose the GA-P35-DS3L. It has a p35 Northbridge and ICH9 southbridge so no raid. This is primarily a client computer in the sense that I’ll be streaming content over my network (wired… Yes I have run cat5e to most every room in the house), so paying the extra 70-80 for raid, more USB ports, and a few extra SATA ports wasn’t important. I’ll be using the Optical audio out. The reason I chose a p35 motherboard is that they usually work out of the box with the new wolfdale core Intel chips… or at the very least only require a bios flash. There have been issues with Nvidia motherboards and the new chip. Particularly I chose Gigabyte because they typically have upgraded built in sound compared to other motherboards in the same price range. With optical out it doesn’t matter really, but just in case, I like to be prepared.

For a graphics card I could have just went with pretty much any Nvidia card that support purevideo, or any ATI card that supported hardware decoding. This ranges from the very cheap to the highest end cards they make. Lucky for me the 512mb Nvidia 9600GT just came out and at $169 it was a no brainer. It should even allow a bit of gaming. The deal breaker, over paying a little more for an 8800GT, was the temperature during use. The 8800GT with a single slot cooler usually hits 90 degree Celsius. The 9600GT hit about 60-65 Degrees. In a media PC this is important.

To round out the list I also picked up: