Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC

Assembling The Second System

Even with the second HTPC, we had problems mounting the hardware components. Once again, the power cord of the P4 connector was too short. We had no luck, even when we pulled and stretched the cord. We had to get an adapter cable. But even our power supply specialist only had one emergency solution up his sleeve. At least the extended P4 connector worked at that point without any further problems.

Even here there were problems cabling the motherboard.

Without an extension the P4 cable would not be long enough.

This motherboard does not offer FireWire.

It was only when we were routing the front connector cables for USB and FireWire that we first noticed this board did not have IEEE1394/FireWire. But we could live with that, because most end-user devices are based on USB anyway.

Hardware Components At A Glance

We sampled the VideoMate DVB-T300 as a TV tuner with DVB-T functions.

Note: You can choose practically any TV tuner. In North America there are virtually no digital solutions, only inferior NTSC. In Europe and Asia there is already a wide choice of cards that can show and record TV in digital DVD quality. Analog television is yesterday's news in the Old World.