Building My Silverstone HTPC
The web seems to be full of pages showing people building their own
machines, and while this could be considered a bit sad, I did find it
useful when researching this project. So, in the spirit of giving
something back, I thought I'd document the assembly of my new HTPC.
I've been running a Shuttle (an XPC
Zen) under the TV for three years now, and using
GBPVR to record and
playback television. In that time I've become
competely addicted to the idea of a 'media centre' [note
the UK spelling - yes, I'm in England], and have generally been
very pleased with GBPVR. But, while it does TV very well indeed,
its handling of music and image files is a bit clunky. Also, the
Shuttle, being a so-called 'small form factor' machine, only has room
for a single expansion card, which is taken up with the Hauppauge TV
card, and a single disk drive, so expansion is effectively ruled
out. Also (and this factor should never be underestimated) I
wanted to play with a new toy.
The Case
The first thing to do was to chose a case. Part of my
dissatisfaction with the Shuttle was that it didn't sit very well with
my other AV kit under the TV. I wanted something that looked like
a piece of hi fi kit. A fair bit of web searching revealed that
you can really spend a lot of money on an HTPC case! However,
part of the point of this project was to do it on a reasonable budget,
so I didn't want to spend more that £150 on a case. I did
however, want a VFD in the front - even though I wasn't sure of the
real benefits of such a device, it struck me as providing a bit of the
'wow' factor I was after.
So, some hard Googling produced a shortlist of cases from Antec, Silverstone, Thermaltake and Zalman. I did in
fact decide on the Zalman
HD 160+, only to discover that no one had one in stock, and the
importers didn't know when they would have any more. Damn.
So then I went with my second choice, which was the Silverstone
LC16M. This had the right look, was the right size, and about
the right price. In addition, Silverstone do their own range of
quiet power supplies, which I assume are fairly well matched to their
cases, so I settled for a ST50EF
PSU.
Motherboard and Processor
Now, despite the fact that I'm building my own PC here, I'm not really
an expert on hardware. Fortunately (for me if not for him), I've
got a mate who is - take a bow, Dave. He recommended a mini-ATX
board with good sound and graphics onboard, to minimise heat and noise
from extra expansion cards, and a low power AMD processor. As
this machine will be running a lot of the the time, and I want it to be
quiet, low power consumption is a key factor both for electricity bills
and the noise generated by cooling fans. Power consumption is becoming
a factor in all sorts of environments now, and the chip manufacturers
are apparently turning on to this, producing a range of "cool 'n'
quiet" CPUs. I decided on the AMD
4850e, which has an amazingly low thermal
envelope of 45 watts, and Dave was able to supply me with this
and a Foxconn
A7GMX-K motherboard, together with an AK-860SF
cooler.
Everything else
Those were all the big decisions - deciding on memory (2 Gb of
Corsair), disk (Hitachi
HDP725032GLA380), DVD drive (LG)
etc was pretty straightforward, along with the all important TV card (Hauppauge
PVR 150).
So, having ordered it all up (most of it from the generally excellent www.scan.co.uk), I had to sit and wait, as
if for Christmas!
Next...assembly