Building a Home Theater PC (HTPC)

When I was younger, I daydreamed of my ultimate entertainment setup as a synergy of all my favorite, most used devices. Here I watch DVDs, play video games, listen to music, watch and record TV shows, and surf the net. Extra consideration was taken into building a quiet PC.

CPU

Pentium 4 3.0GHz 800M LGA775 530J

RAM

• (2x) 512MB PC3200B DDR SDRAM 184-Pin (Crucial)
  
• (2x) 512MB PC3200B DDR SDRAM 184-Pin (Corsair ValueSelect) [upgrade]

Mobo

EPoX Intel 915P EP-5EPAJ

Video

• ATI Radeon X800GTO 256MB - HIS Hightech HX80GOQT256-3TOEN PCI Express x16 [upgrade]
  
• ATI TV Wonder 650 (HDTV Tuner / Personal Video Recorder) [upgrade]

Sound

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic [upgrade]
with Digital I/O Module for SPDIF output

Hard Drives

• 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740GD (SATA 10,000RPM 8MB Cache)
  
• 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS (SATA 7,200RPM 16MB Cache) – Quiet! [upgrade]

DVD

16x NEC DVD Burner IDE/ATAPI Model ND-3540A

Case

Antec Mid Tower SLK3000-B

Power Supply

Antec Phantom 350W (fanless)

Monitors

• Samsung 32" LCD HDTV (primary)
  
• Dell 20" 2001FP LCD (secondary)

Speakers

Logitech 5.1

Useful Applications

• Coolmon — Monitors performance. Useful for seeing what application is sucking up all your CPU time or when RAM is low.
• UltraMon — A must for dual monitors.
• DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink — Great for ripping Netflix DVDs!

Photos