Thursday, January 17, 2008
How to Build a Vista Media Center PC
Posted by Jeremy Charette in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 12:00 PM
Work From The Bottom Up
Every great house is built on a strong foundation. In the same vein, every good computer starts with a great case. I opted to go with the Antec Fusion 430 home theater PC (HTPC) case. This case has so many neat little features it's hard to decide where to start.
Figure 1: The Antec Fusion 430 HTPC case. Doesn't look much like a computer does it?
With a sleek brushed aluminum front panel and a large volume knob, this case fits right into my A/V rack. It looks less like a computer and more like a piece of stereo equipment. An IR receiver is integrated into the front panel and works seamlessly with Windows Media Center Edition. The case also includes a two line vacuum fluorescent display on the front panel, which can display a variety of information such as date & time, CPU usage, or current song playing. Truth be told, the readout was too small for me to see at 8 feet, but it impresses visitors.
Living Room Enemy Number 1: Noise
This case is designed to be quiet. Very quiet. Mike Chin, editor of SilentPCReview.com, served as a functional design consultant on the project. His input helped make this one of the quietest cases you can buy. The enemy of every computer is heat. Heat has to be removed from any computer, and in the case of an air-cooled system, that means moving large quantities of air. Airflow usually means noise, which is something you don't want from an HTPC.
Figure 2: The inside of the Antec Fusion case. You can see the three distinct thermal zones: motherboard in the middle, hard drive on the top, and power supply on the right.
To combat this, Antec divided the Fusion into three distinct thermal zones. The power supply (which generates much of the heat in a computer) is relegated to its own zone on the left side of the case, along with the optical drive bay. It pulls in and exhausts air completely separate from any of the other components in the system. There is an adjustable pass-through divider between the motherboard zone and the power supply zone, allowing power cables to go through the bulkhead, but limiting airflow between the two thermal zones. The power supply itself is a very capable 430W unit manufactured by Seasonic for Antec. It also turned out to be very quiet.
Figure 3: The drive bay. Note the silicone grommets which isolate the hard drives, as well as the ample venting in the bottom of the bay to draw air past the hard drives. Thanks to this the hard drive is barely audible when running, yet stays cool.
The hard drive zone is fully vented on the bottom of the case. The wall between the hard drive zone and motherboard zone has a moderate gap at the top, forcing air to flow in from underneath the case, past the hard drive(s), and over the top of the baffle and out the case. The hard drives are mounted vertically, with silicon grommets to prevent vibrations from reaching the rest of the case.
