Hardware Continued
Optical Drive (CD/DVD Drives)
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Here is where you going to spend a bit of money. If you plan on moving into the Blu-Ray market you’re going need to get a drive that supports it. If you’re just looking to play Blu-Rays you can find a drive for about 70 dollars that will read and play them, but if you’re wanting the writing capability with that you’re looking more 250-400 dollar range. I currently don’t have the money to fork out for one that writes so can’t suggest a good solid one to purchase. I would go through and check the reviews and do a little research before you purchase one.
Hard Drive
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This is going to be dependent on if you’re storing and capturing videos. If your just using this box like a Media Player Then you’re not going to need a very big drive. If you do plan on using the full functionality of the Capture Card then you will want something that has some space to it. For a Terabyte drive you’re looking at 100- 200 dollars. Once again this price is going to be depended on the size of the drive.
Case
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This is another depended on your what you prefer I went with a solid black case so that it would fit in with all my other media equipment and not stand out as a PC in its self. You want a case that will fit your motherboard and all its attached components with good clearance for you card. Seeing as you have the all-in-wonder card you may not be able to use some of the actual Mini or Micro towers. Thermaltake makes extremely good cases in my opinion. Price is going to depended on personal preference my case only cost me 75 dollars.
Power Supply
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You’re going to need enough power to supply the machine for all its needs but also want to think about keeping your total power usage as low as possible as this will be on as much as your TV is. I personally went with a 500 watt power supply and haven’t run into any issues. I wouldn’t spend more than 60 dollars on a power supply.
For the base machine you will have all you need right there to get you started. I didn’t add keyboard and mouse into the list as I didn’t see them meriting a section all to themselves, but you will need them for the first setup of the machine and possibly the later during its actual functionality.
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.