Thursday, January 17, 2008
How to Build a Vista Media Center PC
Posted by Jeremy Charette in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 12:00 PM
Part Pleasure, Part Pain
Figure 15: Now I can watch Dr. No anytime I want, without ever leaving the couch.
In all, my build took about three hours, and a few more hours to transfer all my content and get everything organized. I had some difficulty getting the motherboard and components into the case, as it’s a very tight fit, but once in place, everything buttoned up very nicely. Between all of the noise reducing features of the Antec Fusion case, and the ultra-quiet Noctua fans and Thermaltake CPU cooler, the noise footprint is just as low as I’d hoped. From the couch, it’s inaudible, so goal achieved. My girlfriend loves it.
As I mentioned, I had tried an ASUS motherboard but it caused a host of problems, and after a month or two of messing around with it, I finally gave up - RMA’d the hard drive and put in the ECS motherboard. I had to re-install Vista and re-load all of my content, which ate up quite a few nights and weekends. On top of that, the ECS board wouldn't play nice with the Kingston RAM until I updated the Bios, which meant digging out a 3.5" floppy drive and heading to the office supply store for some floppy discs! For reference, I started this article over six months ago. Suffice it to say, building your own HTPC can be rewarding and fun, but it can also be fraught with peril and frustration.
Now I’ve got a very capable Media Center PC which I’ve been enjoying immensely. Total budget to build this PC would have been under $900, quite a bit less than it would have been off the shelf. If I had to do it all over again, I would only make a couple of changes. A black HTPC case would have blended better with the components in my A/V rack, and lo and behold, Antec now offers a black version of the Fusion case. I also would have gone with dual 750GB hard drives, as I’m quickly filling the one that’s in there. And of course, I would have equipped it with a dual-format HD DVD/Blu-Ray drive, and a video card with HDMI and the horsepower to match. That might be a good subject for a future article. I have to issue a huge thanks to the folks at Antec, AMD, Seagate, Noctua, Kingston, and ADS Technology for all of their help with this project.
Jeremy Charette is a Contributing Editor at Digital Home Thoughts, and also works in Procurement for one of the world’s largest banks. He enjoys reading, gaming, and watching James Bond movies. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, USA. He thinks Media Center is the coolest thing Microsoft has ever produced.
Figure 15: Now I can watch Dr. No anytime I want, without ever leaving the couch.
In all, my build took about three hours, and a few more hours to transfer all my content and get everything organized. I had some difficulty getting the motherboard and components into the case, as it’s a very tight fit, but once in place, everything buttoned up very nicely. Between all of the noise reducing features of the Antec Fusion case, and the ultra-quiet Noctua fans and Thermaltake CPU cooler, the noise footprint is just as low as I’d hoped. From the couch, it’s inaudible, so goal achieved. My girlfriend loves it.
As I mentioned, I had tried an ASUS motherboard but it caused a host of problems, and after a month or two of messing around with it, I finally gave up - RMA’d the hard drive and put in the ECS motherboard. I had to re-install Vista and re-load all of my content, which ate up quite a few nights and weekends. On top of that, the ECS board wouldn't play nice with the Kingston RAM until I updated the Bios, which meant digging out a 3.5" floppy drive and heading to the office supply store for some floppy discs! For reference, I started this article over six months ago. Suffice it to say, building your own HTPC can be rewarding and fun, but it can also be fraught with peril and frustration.
Now I’ve got a very capable Media Center PC which I’ve been enjoying immensely. Total budget to build this PC would have been under $900, quite a bit less than it would have been off the shelf. If I had to do it all over again, I would only make a couple of changes. A black HTPC case would have blended better with the components in my A/V rack, and lo and behold, Antec now offers a black version of the Fusion case. I also would have gone with dual 750GB hard drives, as I’m quickly filling the one that’s in there. And of course, I would have equipped it with a dual-format HD DVD/Blu-Ray drive, and a video card with HDMI and the horsepower to match. That might be a good subject for a future article. I have to issue a huge thanks to the folks at Antec, AMD, Seagate, Noctua, Kingston, and ADS Technology for all of their help with this project.
Jeremy Charette is a Contributing Editor at Digital Home Thoughts, and also works in Procurement for one of the world’s largest banks. He enjoys reading, gaming, and watching James Bond movies. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, USA. He thinks Media Center is the coolest thing Microsoft has ever produced.
