Home Theater PC – the hardware March 10th, 2007
Simply, it’s standard PC, including an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, an Abit AN-7 motherboard, a cheap video card with S-Video Out, hard drives, DVD drive and three Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 TV encoding cards and one PVR-150..
My HTPC case case is a standard Antec tower case. This is not designed for the HTPC service.
For extra air flow (I have 4 TV tuner cards plus a heat-sinked video card), I added an Antec Cyclone slot fan, but that’s a pretty noisy solution — not motor or bearing noise, but the noise of moving the air. Also, the Antec Cyclone fan only lasted about 4 months before the bearing went out. Not satisfactory. I replaced it with a brand-X similar slot fan which has performed quietly and well. Imagine that…
The motherboard decision was made in concert with the processor decision. I’m a fan of the AMD Athlon XP processor because of its price compared to comparable Intel processors. The processor decision alone saved me a couple hundred dollars. I’ve used Abit motherboards for both AMD and Intel processors. Abit has a history of releasing new BIOS flashes for their motherboards, so I would be able to do some upgrading later.
Read more in Home Theater PC, part 2