How to Build an HTPC

How to Build an HTPC

Roydon Cerejo, Apr 24, 2009 1300 hrs IST

Intel, Nvidia or AMD, find out which one suits you the best

With the onset of the holiday season, it's the perfect time to catch up on your movie collection. This is for all you movie buffs who have a collection of HD movies but could not watch them properly, thanks to your age-old computer. Today, we'll be putting together three HTPC configurations, so you can pick the one that suits you the best. Sometime back we had put together a guide on 'building your own Nettop' and today we'll be finally building it to see what it is capable of.

For housing our components, Zebronics has sent us their Tambi mini-ITX case which is perfect for a HTPC. This case is capable of housing a mini-ITX motherboard, a single hard disk and an optical drive, which is just what we need. So let's take a look at the components real quick and then we shall get on with building it.

We'll be using two different mini-ITX motherboards, the first is based on the Intel Atom and the second is a more expensive motherboard based on the Nvidia 9300 chipset. We've also thrown in the crowd favourite 780G in there along with an inexpensive Athlon X2 processor as the third build. So without further ado, let's check out our shiny new components.

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Discussion Board

(5) Comments

Santanu Sinha

,Kolkata, on May 31, 2010 07:42 PM

I can't tell whether the recommended boards/graphics cards have a HDMI/DVI/SD video output. However, I can clearly see that it has no digital audio out. Last time I checked, HT in "HTPC" meant, Home Theater. So how do you plan to plug this ugly can into your HT setup? Using multi channel audio outputs? Or that seemed trivial? A decent HTPC would atleast need the following: 1) A decent graphics that can handle 1080p video and has atleast some options for video output, so the user can change the display to a LCD TV or connect a CRT TV for the moment. 2) A decent CPU that can handle streaming while viewing content 3) Audio output with digital audio out (optical/coax) that users can hook into their AV receivers in the future. 4) Preferably Wifi connectivity not only for net connectivity, but also for streaming content to other devices such as the PS3. See, you only concentrated on cheap, but most of us AV junkies (which essentially is the target base for your article), a HT setup is not built in one day. It's built component by component. With the above config, the user will be able to build upon the system. With your config, they would be stuck with junk after 2 months. If you don't know what you are talking about, don't write an article.