Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC

Waiting For An Update

At this point we would have liked to pitch the project into the trash. But as fate would have it, the product manager for the Hiper case called unexpectedly. After describing our misfortunes, we were told that the case was designed more for an AMD-based motherboard. A cooperative effort between Hiper, AMD and MSI would bear fruit soon, we were told. This is likely to produce an HTPC in short order.

Hiper also acknowledged the problem immediately and will present an alternative slimline case in the next few months. The problems that we had even in the last HTPC test with the Hiper chassis would then be a thing of the past. An HTPC with a display and remote control is also reportedly being planned. A Hiper chassis with a common interface for pay TV smart cards is also in the planning stages.

Second Attempt: Alternative HTPC Based On The AMD64 Processor

DIY HTPC, second try: This time with an AMD Athlon64 processor

Once we saw that our pipe dream with the Intel mobile processor and the AOpen board was not all we'd cracked it up to be, we wanted to realize the project again with different hardware. The same specifications were in effect as the first time. But we ran into unexpected problems even in searching for the appropriate board. We finally found one, the AOpen s760GX-M. The board is based on an SIS chipset for Socket 754 CPUs and also offers integrated graphics along with the AGP port. However, this board doesn't have S-Video or composite jacks. But it's not the only board that doesn't. We don't know of any board (except for the AOpen i915GMm-HFS) that comes with these functions. Because the Hiper Media Chassis included a suitable CPU fan to begin with, this board was just right for us. Other motherboards seemed to be lacking even in terms of the CPU fan.