Another HTPC Build

I spent the first couple of evenings this week putting together a new home theater PC for J, our friend, classmate, and neighbor. I wanted to give her enough power to smoothly play 1080p content on her TV, while leaving some headroom for upgrades down the line (and space for extra internal HDDs). All the parts together came in a decent amount under $500, but shipping and tax (Newegg has a base in CA, so we have to pay our hefty 9% sales tax on purchases) pushed it over.

I went with an AMD CPU because right now, you can get some great power at a low cost compared to Intel’s offerings. At the high end, Intel really seems to dominate (especially if you like overclocking), but for budget systems AMD’s value is hard to beat. The Gigabyte motherboard has integrated ATI graphics and can output both video and audio through HDMI, which is perfect for this application. It’s also an easy way to upgrade the system if it becomes necessary—just drop in a video card.

Antec makes some great cases, and the Three Hundred is a straightforward one and I like the upward-facing exhaust fan. It also leaves a lot of space for terabyte HDDs, which fill up alarmingly fast when you start collecting HD content. While I personally don’t tend to be a big fan of collecting physical media, my friend has Blu-Ray discs so we added a player. The system is running Windows 7 x64, and, like Tess (formerly Zoe), has a user account that can load XBMC instead of the Explorer shell.

Here are the specs:

• AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor
• 4 GB DDR3 RAM
• 500W PSU (allowing for later addition of a video card or HDDs)
• Gigabyte motherboard with integrated graphics and multichannel audio output, as well as SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0.
• 500 GB HDD with space for many more.