Today I received a pile of new Computer components delivered by UPS. After chomping at the bit for quite a long time, I've finally decided to build a new HTPC for the bar/basement room. This PC will be using BeyondTV Link & Beyond Media and will receive streamed TV, Video, DVD, Music etc content streamed from my BeyondTV Server PC.
I toyed with three different ideas for this room:
1. Putting the PC in the unfinished portion of the basement and using the wiring already in place to get to the TV. I'm currently doing this with a very old, underpowered PC in that room. I have all wiring run through a drop ceiling down to the TV. This actually was a pretty good solution, and I'll be keeping the wiring in place for now. In the end though, I wanted to try my hand at making PC with a true, HTPC case that could handle DVD and CD play when wanted.
2. My second thought was to buy a used or off-lease dell optiplex. I've done this in the past with good results, but the desire to use a HTPC case was too strong.
3. HTPC case built to be quiet and fit into the environment. This is the solution I settled on.
Thanks to the help of snapstream forum members including cmcquistion, I chose the following components:
Case - Antec NSK2400 (includes the power supply)
Motherboard - ASUS M2NPV-VM Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Lima 2.2GHz 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor
Memory - 1G (512mb X 2)
Kingston ValueRAM 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) System Memory
Hard Drive - I have a spare Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Video - I'll use onboard for now and see how it handles things
Sound - onboard
LAN - onboard
Fans and heatsinks - I'm using the stock fans and heatsinks for now and might upgrade for silence later
The forum thread where I asked for and received much help on the build decisions can be found HERE
I'll post more on how the build goes as well as some pictures once the project is complete.
