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Building An HTPC For $1000 |
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By Alan Cooke | Published Tuesday, 31 July 2007 |
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Not so long ago, building a HTPC for a thousand dollars was a relatively easy affair. There were not a lot of hardware choices that made sense for the Media Center Enthusiast. Not so anymore my fine furry friend. Not only has the parts available for HTPC specific requirements exploded, the number of PC options have exploded as well. This article promises to be long if nothing else. While I will do my best to hit the 1000 dollar mark, We will also throw in a couple of other alternatives to see what you can do with your hard earned money.
Rules:
We need to define our build a bit. It is easy to throw spare PC parts in a case and call it a HTPC. Not to say that is a bad thing, that is how many of us got our start in the game. However, in pursuit of the ultimate WAF, we want this to be something that is usable by your significant other.
In the function department, our goal is to have this be a fully functional Media Center PC. Why clarify this? Well, we just want to let you know that this won't be a client PC, or a Media Server. It will be a fully contained unit capable of operating on its own. Developing a client/server plan for your home is a whole different story. A few of the functions we will cover are DVD playback, music playback, ATSC and NTSC capture and playback.
In the building department, again in pursuit of the ultimate WAF, we want to build a machine that looks decent and runs nice and cool. This means no stock coolers, no 10K RPM hard drives, no overclocking (although it is quite possible with the current gen CPUs) and no ugly cases.
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