Home Theater PC Break Down
Introduction
Most people have heard of what a Home Theater PCs (otherwise known as a Media PC) is by now. As they are becoming more and more common outside of the normal cliché of what is known as the computer “Geek” world. Just look at today’s market of products you can buy DVR’s, WD Media Player, Popcorn Hour’s, and as well as the XBOX and PS3 platforms all built of concepts derived from PCs. What do these platforms lack that you have in the Media PC? Well depending on the platform it could be any number of things. DVR’s have no web browsing or gaming ability but can capture live TV showings and movies, Media Players are limited by the GUI interface and their hardware (yes some of them are upgradeable but they are still limited on what you can put in them), and Gaming platforms have a limited to no Web ability and are as limited to hardware upgrades as the Media Players. With a Media PC you have all of the abilities of all the platforms and only one drawback that the others have a set price. Your Media PC price will be dependent on what you put in it when the others are set price for the product.
So what do you need to get Media PC up and running? As with any PC you will need the standard base items.
- Motherboard
- CPU
- Memory
- Graphics Card
- Sound Card
- Hard Drive
- Optical Drive
- Case
- Keyboard
- Mouse
Now the actually components of each of those categories is more than just going out and buying a generic piece for each one so I have done a break down a few suggestions and prices for each piece.
home theathers with 5.1 system sounds really great specially if you add those 12 inch subwoofers `;:
I just finished putting together my first Home Theater PC. I used an MSI Diva Live 5.1 Mobo with the amplifier card with 2GB of DDR2, and a low voltage Athlon X2. Threw in an HD 5570 for encoding purposes using DVDfab and 3TB of storage. It drives my Bose 5.1 bose cubes and bass unit and sounds as good as my old Yamaha.
Yes the Bose is one of the better audio setups out there. I have some HTPC setups with just the 3 speaker setup sound better than guys running 5 and 7 speaker kits. It was actually a direction i was looking at going myself and was just talking with a few Techwarelabs writer about it today.
The article provides no useful information, and the grammar is atrocious.
“Depended” doesn’t work that way.
Thank you for the feedback on the spelling mistake, we are not perfect and do make mistakes. As for the guide, as I mentioned above, the guide is intended for a beginner and to demonstrate the through process behind component selection. Perhaps your skill level makes this guide less useful to you but I’m sure it is much more useful to someone who has not built a media center PC/ HTPC before.
I really am sorry that you didn’t like or find my article useful. It was purposely written for a user just starting to get into the Home Theater area of PC’s and not for someone that has moderate to above average knowledge. As for the grammar errors well those mistakes are all mine. I should have done a better job at spelling and grammatical checking before submitting the article. I will work on that. Thank you for you replies they do help me out positive or negative.
This is bar none the WORST media pc building guide I have ever read.
This is a basic guide and not intended to take you through every step necessary to create a media center PC. Instead the intent is to show you what components are necessary and demonstrate some through process behind the building and selection of components. Stay tuned to us for a thorough guide to this process in the future.