We Got Served

I love TV. I love PC’s. What could be better for me than to combine the two together? Media Center has to be one of the best things I discovered after upgrading to Vista. I had seen a version of Media Center 2005 running on an old Sony Viao laptop, but didn’t think much of it (or even what the point of it was at the time), but after I got an Xbox 360 Elite I thought I hook it up to my Vista Ultimate desktop and give it a try. It started out just playing music and showing people family photos, but I was keen to hit that ‘Setup TV’ button. I bought a Hauppauge Nova-T Dual tuner stick, plugged it all in and I was a very happy boy. It’s great just to be able to sit back and record shows at the touch of a button and pausing Live TV is just fantastic.

I decided to build a dedicated Media Center PC to sit under the TV as I wanted to cut back on the number of devices running just so I could watch live TV. I had to have my desktop PC and my Xbox 360 on, and as everyone knows the 360 is not a quiet beast. I was also redecorating the lounge, so I decided to bury the video/aerial/satellite cables under the carpet and after the carpet was down they wouldn’t reach the desktop PC anymore. I started by making a list of all the things I wanted this new HTPC to do, and design it around that. Here goes:

• Silent (or as quiet as possible)
• Look good under the TV
• Play some games using Xbox 360 controller
• Playback Blu-Ray & HD-DVD movies
• Playback archived DVD’s
• Watch FTA HD (BBC HD to be precise)
• Connect to TV with HDMI & HDCP
• Use one remote control for PC, V & Sony 5.1 amp

Would this all be possible..? Time to find out!

Hardware

I decided to search for the case first as it would be living in my lounge and it needs to look like it belongs there. I came across the mCubed Classic first. This is a beautifully designed case, and also completely silent as it uses heat pipes for the CPU and graphics card connected to the massive heat sinks on the side of the case. Unfortunately the case is very very expensive! Its almost £500 if you add all the parts required for silent running. I then came across the Antec Fusion 430. My desktop PC is built with an Antec P180, which is a great case and very quiet (although a little large). I read a few reviews of the Fusion and it seemed to have everything I wanted so I decided to go with that.

Next on the list is the CPU cooler. I have a Scythe Ninja in my desktop PC and this is wonderfully quiet, so went for the Mini Ninja for the new HTPC case.

Graphics were the next consideration. As this was primarily a Media Center PC, the graphics card didn’t need to be super quick, but did have to be TV friendly. I went with an MSI Nvidia 8500. This isn’t the current generation of video cards but it did have the advantage of being passively cooled and has a HDMI port with HDCP on it.

For the HD drive I went with the LG HD-DVD/Blu-Ray combo. Although HD-DVD is now officially dead, I still have a couple of HD-DVD’s and our online film rental still rents HD-DVD discs.

Lastly we have the TV tuners. I’m a fan of Hauppauge, and I wanted both Freeview, and FTA satellite so went with two Nova-DVB-S2 cards and a Nova 500 Dual Freeview card.

That’s it for part one, in part 2 I’ll be putting all the hardware together.