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Building Htpc


tomturd

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Qty Product QuickFind Stock Price Line Total delete.gif

Antec Fusion Remote Veris Black MATX Media Center Case - No PSU 148791 13 in stock £109.48 £95.20 £109.48 £95.20 delete.gif

Arctic Power 500W PSU With PCI-E 2x SATA, 20+4 ATX12V 8pin +12V Connectors - Retail Boxed 124922 37 in stock £28.98 £25.20 £28.98 £25.20 delete.gif

Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA II 7200RPM 16MB Cache - OEM 124228 272 in stock £39.90 £34.69 £39.90 £34.69 delete.gif

Sony AD-7200S 20X DVD±RW/DL/RAM Internal SATA Bare Black Drive - OEM 139414 104 in stock £16.99 £14.77 £16.99 £14.77 delete.gif

Asus P5QPL-VM EPU G41 Socket 775 DVI HDMI VGA 8 Channel Audio mATX Motherboard 167168 111 in stock £60.09 £52.25 £60.09 £52.25 delete.gif

LP4 MALE TO SERIAL ATA POWER ADAPTER (Connects SATA Hard Drive to IDE Internal Power Connector) 158874 3395 in stock £1.35 £1.17 £1.35 £1.17 delete.gif

Plexus Serial ATA 2.0 (SATA) 7-pin Cable (Red) 46cm / 18" 151963 500 in stock £1.99 £1.73 £3.98 £3.46 delete.gif

Intel Pentium Dual Core E5300 2.6GHz Socket 775 800FSB 2MB L2 Cache OEM Processor 166192 7 in stock £52.99 £46.07 £52.99 £46.07 delete.gif

Xilence 4ALL XQ AM2, 754, 939, 940, LGA 775 Heatpipe CPU Cooler with Frameless Fan 166287 6 in stock £15.12 £13.14 £15.12 £13.14 delete.gif

Extra Value Thermal Compound Silver Grease 072292 500 in stock £0.79 £0.68 £0.79 £0.68 delete.gif

Corsair 4Gb (2x2GB) DDR2 1066MHz/PC2-8500 XMS2 Memory CL5 (5-6-6-18) 2.1V 166818 232 in stock £38.63 £33.59 £38.63

Total is £370. I want the case.. but everything else is optional. Suggestions welcome :)

edit: feck it. I've gone for it.

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A home theatre without a dedicated graphics card? I hope your not planning on going HD video.

Arctic silver 5 too for the thermal paste, for the sake of a few pounds don't go for ebuyers own.

I've done a fair bit of reading around and it sounds like the onboard graphics card will handle HD just fine (seems not many people bother with a graphics card, just get an HDMI mobo - then you don't need to worry about the extra heat generated by it). And yeah.. the paste, too late I'm afraid :( Seemed to get better reviews than the arctic silver 5 so I've gone for it. Just need to decide what OS now, probably Windows 7 but might have a play with linux first :)

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Let me know how you get on - I want to do this pretty soon. At the moment I'm using my shuttle as a semi-HTPC thing, it's old but it handles everthing fine. It's just noisy.

Also:

TV tuner(s)?

Remote controls are waaay important - do you already have one? The MCE one is probably the best, because it's cheap and works with more or less everything. (EDIT: I can see the case has one :) )

No BD drive? You know you want to!

Are you going to be accessing network storage? 500Gb seems a bit small if you're going to do things like recording/timeshifting etc.

Did you decided what software you want to use? I'm using MediaPortal running on XP which seems OK for everything I can throw at it, plus it seems very stable. It's a f**ker to set up though, definitely one for those who enjoy tinkering...! It's better than MCE (or Win 7) for cataloguing and library thingies.

mediaportalsupernaturalxc2.jpg

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I've seen that episode, it was actually pretty good. I also really REALLY want that 67 chevvy impala.

I'm thinking of delving into the realms of HTPC at the minute but i'm trying to decide whether it'd be better running an application based thing that i can activate via remote to run as a normal program in vista or going for a separate dedicated machine.

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A home theatre without a dedicated graphics card? I hope your not planning on going HD video.

Arctic silver 5 too for the thermal paste, for the sake of a few pounds don't go for ebuyers own.

Im an Artic Cooling MX-2 paste man myself. Works quite abit better than silver 5 with less chance of frying the board if the paste happens to get on a pcb somehow.

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Let me know how you get on - I want to do this pretty soon. At the moment I'm using my shuttle as a semi-HTPC thing, it's old but it handles everthing fine. It's just noisy.

Also:

TV tuner(s)?

Remote controls are waaay important - do you already have one? The MCE one is probably the best, because it's cheap and works with more or less everything. (EDIT: I can see the case has one :) )

No BD drive? You know you want to!

Are you going to be accessing network storage? 500Gb seems a bit small if you're going to do things like recording/timeshifting etc.

Did you decided what software you want to use? I'm using MediaPortal running on XP which seems OK for everything I can throw at it, plus it seems very stable. It's a f**ker to set up though, definitely one for those who enjoy tinkering...! It's better than MCE (or Win 7) for cataloguing and library thingies.

TV Tuner, erm, is the usual idea to have (in my case) virgin media running through the HTPC, and then using the HTPC for absolutely everything? I don't think I'm going to do that... my have amp does a wonderful job of switching inputs and the thought of having to wait for a PC to boot up before being able to watch telly doesn't really appeal..

The case comes with a pretty cool looking remote control (with built in remote receiver), and I also ordered a keyboard with a touchpad and htpc kinda buttons (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158377)

Blu ray, nah :P to be honest (dont tell anyone) I can't even remember the last time I bought a DVD :S

The smallish hard drive I chose because people said it was super quiet whereas the 1tb alternative people said was super noisy, I think 500gb will be alright, I'm not as bad at hoarding as I used to be :D

I'll give media portal a go I think, looks pretty cool and I'll happily spend hours/days on setting things up until I'm happy with them. If that fails though I might go back to XBMC which I already know is bloody brilliant.

Once it all arrives I'll get some pics up :)

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From what I can tell, Media Portal and XBMC are very similar. I have Media Portal on PC and XBMC on my xbox. The main difference is that media portal is designed for TV tuners, so the live TV integration is good, whereas the inbuilt video-library-thingy isn't amazing, and you have to use some plugins*. Whereas XBMC is the opposite - it's designed more for the video library aspect and live TV needs plugins. Since it sounds like you're not after live TV anyway, maybe it's best to go with XBMC.

*My-TV series and My-Films would be the plugins you want :)

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