Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC

Selection Of HTPC Components

We went with the Hiper Media Chassis. As far as dimensions go, it is hardly bigger than a commercially available DVD player. That's what our smart living-room PC should eventually turn out to look like.

Motherboard And Processor

MicroATX form factor motherboards are available for every processor socket.

The form factor of the motherboard for our case cannot be larger than a MicroATX, and there is a wide selection available. What's more, the motherboard should already have onboard graphics, because the only free slot in the case is already taken up by the TV tuner card. In general, the main question deals with the platform - AMD or Intel? Initially, our choice was the Pentium M mobile processor from Intel. That was because an earlier test had demonstrated that this CPU gave off very little heat, resulting in less heat loss. For the board, we fell back on AOpen's i915GMm-HFS model.

AOpen i915GMm-HFS - one of the few motherboards for the Intel Pentium Mobile CPU

Good starting conditions: An unbelievable number of ports is already onboard

A notebook processor with 2.13 GHz will power our HTPC