Once I decided to build a PC, the next step was to choose hardwares. Since it gonna sit in my living room side by side with the receiver, it can’t look too shabby. It must be quiet as well. I definitely don’t want a box that whines all the time when I am watching my favorite movie. Also, I don’t want to break my bank to build this HTPC. I just need it to be fast enough to handle all my digital contents. In the future, whenever needed, I can easily upgrade it.
This was not my first time to build a PC from scratch. Actually, almost all my desktop PCs were built manually. But I hadn’t built one for more than a year, so I had to catch up with the latest technology. There are so many good resources online, about motherboard, CPU, video card, … but I found this one was most helpful to me. The author renethx gave not only a full recommendation list of hardwares for both AMD and Intel architectures, but also a long reference list. If you don’t want to dig too deep, any combo from the recommended list should be good enough for an HTPC; if you do want to learn, the reference list is a good start.
Anyway, with all these requirements in mind, after several days’ research, I finally chose these components:
1. CPU: Intel Duo Core E2160, $80, from Microcenter
This was a hard decision for me, because it gonna affect what motherboard to use, and eventually what the PC would look like. Actually I am a long time AMD user and have always loved it. But recently, the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs just made the whole competition no match. They are faster, cooler, and more overclockable than AMD X2. Nowadays, it is almost a no-brainer to use an Intel CPU when building a new PC.
However, remember one of my goals in my previous post? — I wanted all the software to be free, hence Linux was the only choice for my operation system. So I had to think twice. A lot of motherboards that support AMD CPUs are integrated with nVidia chipsets, and nVidia’s proprietary drivers on Linux provide a very complete feature set compared to its Windows’ version; on the other side, most motherboards for Intel CPUs come with Intel’s chipsets, and the support usually is not as good, some features may not be fully functional.This was a big trade-off. I read a lot of articles and reviews, but eventually decided to still go with Intel CPUs — not only because they are more powerful, but more importantly, the high efficiency means cooler case, quieter machine and less energy consumption. As to Linux drivers, I guessed I had to deal with them. Fortunately, with the great Linux communities, I believed I could find helps I needed easily.
I had two candidates for my CPU: Core 2 Duo E6550 / E6750 or Dual Core E2140 / E2160. I didn’t give too much thought to the Quad Core CPUs because they are still expensive and I believed a dual core PC would be more than enough for my daily entertainment use. You may think my two candidates for the CPU are interesting, because they are at two ends: E6550/E6750 is at the top product line of C2D CPUs, while E2140 / E2160 is really an entry level CPU in this family. You are right, that’s exactly my philosophy: either going to the low end to save money (with easy upgrade in the future), or taking the (reasonablely) high end to be mind free for a while.
After a few days’ shopping around, I bought the E2160 from Microcenter finally. Looked saving money was more important than mind-free for me, 
According to renethx, this CPU might not be powerful enough to handle 1080p content playback. But with its superb overclockablity, it wouldn’t be a real problem.
2. Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H, $120, from newegg.com
mATX board is a straightforward choice for an HTPC. The compact design make it ideal for a smaller PC case that is not too intrusive in a living room. I didn’t pick the board recommended by renethx (abit F-I90HD) because it comes with an integrated ATI video card, which is known to be problematic under Linux. Choosing Linux did narrow the available selections of motherboard! Now I had to do my own homework. After some research, I chose this board because of following reasons:
- Relative new technology: Intel G33 and ICH9 chipsets are not cutting edge, but both are relatively new. I definitely don’t want my PC obsolete on the day when it is built.
- Very good upgradeability: It supports FSB up to 1333MHz, which means I can easily plug in a Quad Core CPU when they are more affordable.
- Rich multimedia features: This is one of those very few boards that provides HDMI output. Even though I don’t care this feature that much, it is still something good to have. To me, the DVI port provides the same functionality because I was going to use S/PDIF port for audio output to my receiver anyway. But if your receiver comes with an HDMI port, or you are fine with audio output from your TV speakers, the HDMI port can be very a convenient feature. This board also has some other ports such as VGA and audio jacks. Since I tried to avoid analog output to achieve the best video and audio quality, they are pretty much useless to me.
- , It has HDMI, DVI and S/PDIF output ports. I don’t want to use analog outputs — either video or audio, so these digital outputs are must-have. HDMI is nice, but be frankly, Actually I was surprised to find
integratedvc: iGC means less energy, cooler, quieter.
pcie 4x enough?
For a motherboard in a HTPC, I definitely wanted to use the integrated graphic card. Nowadays, the on-board graphic card is quite capable to do most of the DVD playback and other decoding such as DVD ripping, MP3 .
- Integrated video card
- Desktop PC case
