[Sheepish]

Hello, I thought you guys might be interested in my little HTPC project I put together last year. After all the htpc software tips and tricks ive picked up from here I thought its only fair I put a little effort into giving a little back. So this is to add to Theydons varied catalogue of different types and styles of HTPC for those thinking of building their own wonderful bundle of joy. Im pretty sure its sufficiently different to those already submitted.

I'd consider the following pricelist to be "budget" at under £300 for the pc alone and handles everything I throw at it, including 1080p playback and even 720p low/med detail gaming (and now I read the 500MHz igp can be overclocked to 900Mhz without problems but havent done so yet)!

Case........£40.......Hiper Media Chassis inc 200W PSU (2nd hand but unopened, £50 new)
HSF.........£25.......Akasa 1.5U (Very low profile) heatsink fan
...............£5........Zalman fanmtae to keep above non-pwm heatsink quiet
CPU.........£42.......AMD 4850E
Mobo........£60......Asus M3A78-EM
RAM.........£22......2x1gb Corsair XMS2
HDD.........£60......750GB Seagate
DVDRW....£28.......Samsung Slimline Slotload
____
£282 (Purchased Oct 2008)


The internals, with a little impatient DIY to connect the Hipers 200W PSU P4 connector to an unreachable corner of the motherboard.. ofcourse I could have visited Maplin next day :/
With the fanmate set as low as it goes the htpc is bearably quiet but probably running a little hot at 50c idle and 62c under Prime95 stress testing.

So pleased with my cheap htpc I went a bit mental and splashed out on a Gyration Media Remote & Keyboard at £90 but I can honestly say its the single greatest pc-related purchase I've ever made. Its amazing. Lounging on the sofa, arm round my girl or underneath a blanket I can still control the computer, play movies or do some simple browsing and the keyboard hasnt once lost connection or repeated/missed keystrokes. HIGHLY recommended!

I wont bother with desktop screenshots as theyre rather generic and there are much better examples of sexy frontends.

My only problem now is I've ran out of disk space... so I'm now trying to weigh up the pro's and con's of either a larger HTPC case, NAS box or a self built little server. So no doubt you'll see me asking for advice on that sometime soon hah.

My whole entertainment corner there consists of -
37" LG 6000 LCD
Cambridge Audio 640A, 640C, DacMagic and Mordaunt Short Mezzo 2 speakers.
A duff old dvd player that is on its last legs and never gets used anymore and Sky.


Any questions, just ask!

~Sheepish

[meansizzler]

I have the same case it is extremely quiet, almost silent, even at full load,

Using 2x WD Scorpio Hard Drives in Raid 0, so 640GB Raid Array, C2D E5200, 4GB RAM, Dual DVB-T PCI-E, Slimline slot load blu ray, internal MCE Reciever mod, and Gigabyte Geforce 9400M Mobo, very fast system..

No need to get anything bigger, I can remove the raid and have independent 2.5" disks, so 2 x 500GB Drives if I wanted..., not really sure why people assume Media Pc's need to be huge amp sized enclosures

[Theydon Bois]

I certainly will add it to 'my collection' thanks for the pics mate.

Are you using a front end at all?

If you are running out of space, although a NAS solution might be the best, dont forget the portable hard drives, something like a Western Digital Book, or even replacing the internal 750 for a 1.5Tb version will give you more room to play about in.

1.5TB Western Digital WD15EADS Caviar Green Power, SATA 3Gb/s, 32MB - Scan.co.uk

WDH1CS10000E - 1TB Western Digital MyBook Home Edition - USB2/FireWire400/eSata External Hard Drive - Scan.co.uk