Thinking of Building (1 Viewer)

[boydn1]

I've been thinking of building a PC for two basic uses.
1. Playback of music (thinking of .flac for lossless.) About 400 now.
2. Playback of my audio DVD's. About 30 now.

I saw an articel at Tom's Hardware on building a low power HTPC. Most of the hardware is directly from there. Will a 400gb drive work for the above and leave room to grow? Please give me your ideas for improvement or will this work fine. Thanks!

Case Undecided
PS Cooler Master's iGreen 600W power supply
Proc Athlon 64 3200+ Energy maybe 3800
MB Asus M2NPV-VM
Cooler ??
HD Seagate 400Gb SATA
DVD SAMSUNG Black 18X DVD+R 32.00
Mem A-Data Vitesta DDR2-533 (PC2-4200)2 512s DIMMS

 

[Spragleknas]

I'd defintly change the PSU and case with Antec's Fusion - cheap and neat.

The "chep" version has been tested by Silent PC Review
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article591-page1.html

Bear in mind that the fusion has a better and quieter PSU

Fusion: http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=15738

 

[boydn1]

Thanks for the input. I have to do a lot more research on cases. I think I want/need room for 3 drives. 1 boot and 2 data drives.
Will the MB and CPU be sufficent?

 

[Spragleknas]

Yes. I have built a very simular system for a friend (using the cheaper NSK2400-case). All good! Highly recommended setup.

I don't belive there is a Energy Eff. 3200+, thoug (but you probably won't hear it anyway).

 

[simonrene]

I built my first HTPC using a silverstone lascala series case for the living room. I had allot of cooling problems, and the case was just adequate, nothing special other than it could easily hold 5 HDDs. I guess I also broke my teeth on this one figuring out how to keep it cool and quiet. At that time 300GBs was large but as soon as I found that seagate was making 750GB drives I moved my rig into its new home: the Antec Fusion with two 750 Sata drives (I partitioned a seperate boot drive), using the Antec stock PSU and a Zalman 7 series fan keeping things cool. I really love this box. 6 months later and I am very happy with this case. I probably invested close to $1,00 building the HTPC, but it was definately worth it. Until I discovered Media Portal, I had no front end; I used a Slim Devices Squeezebox with slimserver to play music to my receiver and a plugin to stream video to the television. I tried commercial GUIs on the PC but they were useless. Anyway, back to the subject, the VFD on the expensive version of the Fusion hardly justifies an extra $100 but the expensive version also looks better (handsome front plate) and if you get the cheap one, and place the case where people can see it, you will regret it. Oh, I also ditched my video card and opted to use the onboard HDMI & SPDIF out on A-bit's Fatality mobo, which fit nicely in this case (this mobo seemed perfect for an HTPC and was on the cheap). I changed the RAM settings dedicating 512MB for video on this mobo and it plays HD video perfectly.

My wife is actually pretty amazed with whole setup (I'm using streamzap configured into our universal remote to make it wife friendly) she uses it all the time and is really impressed with me. She's got the entire Sex & the City series at her fingertips and thanks to the good people at Media Portal, she can browse our photos and play music etc. I've got massive brownie points. Her girl friends come by and say, "hey, this is pretty cool, where did you get this?" And she's like, "my husband built it!" All of the sudden I'm the sexiest guy on our block. Boydn1, I'm giving you a 3rd reason to build an HTPC: sex appeal.