We Got Served

So now I know what I want this new PC to do, and I’ve decided on what hardware I want, it’s time to put the beast together. I’ve been building my own PC’s on and off for the past 10 years or there about, so it’s not too much of a daunting challenge.

First of all make sure you have all of the parts. I thought I had everything together, but as it was all going in I realised I had forgotten to order the ram! Luckily I had the 512mb left over from my MediaSmart upgrade, but don’t ever run Vista with just 512mb as it will run like a total dog. Obviously the first thing to go in was the motherboard. I chose the Asus P5GC-VM. I’ve always been a fan of Asus boards as they have always been very reliable. This was the only Micro ATX board I could find that had 3 PCI slots (for the 3 PCI tuner cards). The only downside is that the board doesn’t have any fire wire connectors, so the fire wire port on the front of the Antec case will not work. It’s a good idea to get the RAM in first as the PCI/graphics cards sit on top of them. With the Asus board make sure you put the ram in the same colour slots. I didn’t and wondered why it wouldn’t boot up…

The graphics card came with a passive heat sink, but it was too wide to fit in next to the other PCI cards. I had to remove the stock heat sink and replace it with a Zalman VNF100 Fanless VGA Cooler. I had to modify this slightly as the fins on the front heat sink overlapped the audio connector on the graphics card. A quick session with a hacksaw took the offending finds off!

The LG HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive goes into the bottom slot of the optical drive caddy, and the spare 250gb hard drive I had goes into the hard drive slot nearest the motherboard (for optimum airflow). I’d recommend putting a bit of gaffer tape across the DVD drive light as I found it quite annoying seeing the light flashing away (it’s very bright on the LG drive).

A few case specific points if you want to go with the Antec Fusion. First I removed one of the side fans and blanked it off as I wanted to keep it as quiet as possible, and second the VFD/IR sensors isn’t wired up properly in the factory. There is a blue & white cabled with Power Switch written on it. This doesn’t go onto the motherboard, but actually goes onto the back of the VFD display. This isn’t mentioned anywhere in the manual, but if you want to turn the PC on with the remote (which you obviously do!) then you need to connect this wire. The red/black cable called Mo-Bo Pwr is what connects to the motherboard power pins.

I had to make some slight tweaks for the audio. The Asus motherboard has 2 pins for the S/PDif audio. This has to be connected to the graphics card so the TV has sound (and also to make it HDCP compatible). I also wanted 5.1 going to my Sony 5.1 amp, but there was no space for the Asus digital coax/optical plate (which wasn’t supplied with the board anyway). What I did was to split the cable between the motherboard and the graphics card, and add a yellow phono connection to the graphics card bracket. The graphics card had a hole designed into the bracket so that you could plug the supplied audio cable from the back of the motherboard S/PDIF out (if your motherboard has one, the Asus didn’t) into the graphics card. I wasn’t sure if splitting the cable would work, but I can confirm that my TV and Sony 5.1 amp are both getting sound.

The Mini Ninja heat sink was a bit of a pain to get in. I’ve not used the new Socket 775 connections before and it took a few attempts to get the clamps to ‘lock’ to the motherboard. I also cut myself quite badly when I put the full sized Ninja into my desktop PC, so be careful with it!

The PCI cads were simple to put in, and don’t have to go in any specific order but I did put the two DVB-S card next to each other. After this it’s a case of tidying all the cables up and securing them out of the way.

I’ve been asked by a few people to provide links to the hardware I’ve used in this build so here is a detailed breakdown of what went into the case:

Case - Antec Fusion 430 Silver - £120 Review

Motherboard – Asus P5GC-VM – £35

Heatsink – Scythe Mini Ninja - £28 Review

Graphics - Zalman VNF100 Fanless VGA Cooler - £20  Review

CPU – Intel 3.0Ghz Core 2 Duo - £113

Graphics Card – MSI 8500 HDMI - £35 

TV Cards: DVB-S: 2 x Hauppauge WinTV Nova HD S2 - £60 each
                DVB-T: Hauppauge WinTV Nova T 500 - £53

Remote control - Philips RC197 (with IR receiver, important for part 3 of this How To guide…) - £34

The 2Gb of RAM was generic (about £25) and the hard drive was an old 250Gb Seagate P-ATA I had lying around. I also bought a Microsoft Xbox 360 wireless receiver for the PC (£15) to let me connect any wireless 360 device. This brings the total spend to about £600, which isn’t bad for what I consider to be ‘The Ultimate Media Center!”

Now all the hardware is in place, it’s time to get installing the software.

That’s for part 3…