Advice for home media station build

[alfil]

Hi everyone!

I want to built a new system which is going to be dedicated as a media station. This is:

■ It will serve music, photos, videos, record and play TV. The plan is to install MythTV, mt-daapd and other similar services.
■ Needs to be quiet
■ Needs to use low energy
■ Have good and fast HD storage (I have a 750GB SATA-II HD that may come handy)
■ Needs to be wife friendly, as it is going to be next to TV, small, pretty and quiet.
■ I have two PCI Hauppage DVB-T cards that I would like to use.
■ I will need TV out to play in the main TV

So I was thinking in a micro-ATX board with a smaller case. But the PCI cards may be a limiting factor for it. Ideally no fans would be a perfect solution, but is it possible?

Has anybody built something similar? Which components do you suggest?

Thank you.

Alfil

 

[hughyhunter]

No fans wont be feasible.

Check this out from TH home page http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/shuttle-xpc-desktop,1921.html

Might be a good bet. I would get a decent hybrid motherboard like the 780G. Maybe Nvidia has one IDK. That way you can use the low power GPU you get (I would recommend HD3870 for you).

Get another 750GB drive and run RAID 1. Back it up! Or you can run RAID 0 and have no insurance but super fast and super storage capacity.

I would recommend an Q6600 or maybe a 9850 black. Those quads will be nice for HTPC.

4GB ram too... Vista? If not XP media!

You list the parts and we'll critique. I haven't personally built a HTPC but am slightly familiar with them.

 

[Andrius]

I recommend 780G + AMD Athlon X2 (45W Energy Efficient edition).
MB 2x PCI + HDMI
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128090
CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103231
Any 2or4 GB DDR2 kit

You'll need an adapter for TV-Out (unless you have HDMI).
Passive cooling is possible but you'd need a very open case for airflow(so it would be noisy anyway).