Building Your Own Media Center PC

If you're a real technology geek and generally like getting your hands dirty, you might enjoy owning a homebuilt media center PC. It takes time and possibly a little frustration, but the fruit of your labor is a very flexible Tivo replacement that can simply do more with your photos, videos and music.

This isn't any typical PC that you're building. It's going to live in your family room (or wherever you have your TV and spend most of your time). That means, in addition to just being a PC, it has to look good, and run quietly.

You need to start buy buying the components for your PC. In addition to purchasing Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (which can only be purchased in combination with a significant computer part, such as a case, CPU, or motherboard -- don't forget to bundle this in with one of those purchases), you need to pick the following components:

1. Case
2. Processor + Cooler
3. Motherboard
4. Power Supply
5. Graphics Card
6. Memory
7. Disk Drives
8. DVD Drive
9. TV receiver card
10. HDTV receiver card
11. Memory card reader (perhaps combined with a floppy drive)
12. Wireless Keyboard

I'll go through a few tips for choosing these components below, but technology changes quickly, and reading a few reliable sources, such as Tom's Hardware Guide, or an RSS feed from AnandTech (above, right) will let you find the best components for your HTPC.

For an example of a complete list of components, here is the most recent HTPC that I built (for my parents for Christmas, 2006).

You really want to choose a case that looks nice to you. In all likelihood your PC will be sitting next to your TV. You don't want to be looking at a beige plastic box sitting next to all of your nice stereo equipment. You also want to choose a case that is large enough to contain standard PC components, and one which has a good airflow design. I highly recommend a case from Origen AE called the X11: unfortunately, it looks like pcalchemy.com is no longer selling them and I haven't found another U.S. distributer -- but if you live in the UK or Australia I think you can still get them. Zalman now has a case very similar to this one in size and cooling capability (and noise signature), the HD 160. It turns out that Origen manufactures this case for Zalman. I recommend it.

Now, once you have your case, you need to build a computer in there.  Generally, you want to choose the most energy efficient processor you can find, to help you keep your computer nice and quiet.

Currently, the best choice for energy efficient CPU's are AMD Athon 64 CPU's.  This may change by September 2006 though, as Intel's Core 2 Duo processors become available.  For purposes of example, I'd recommend buying an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice) for socket 939 for starters.  If you want to get something more recent, you can look for a processor that runs on AM2 chipsets (instead of socket 939) but you have to make sure whatever form factor you choose (socket 939 or AM2) matches with your motherboard selection.

You also need to buy a CPU cooler to cool the CPU (the cooler that comes with the retail kit is a bit too loud).  There used to be a very good cooler called the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 -- this is very quiet and keeps the CPU very cool.  It appears that this has been replaced now with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro, and has gotten 6.5mm taller (the older model was pretty tight to start with) and 15mm longer.  This may or may not be just barely too large to fit in this case, but it's worth a shot, it's a great cooler.  A more conservative choice (should be just as quiet) from the same company is the Alpine 64 which won't be too tall for the case for sure.

And now, you must also purchase your motherboard.  What you really want to look for is a motherboard that has coaxial S/PDIF output (so that you can take a digital audio signal out and feed it into your high-end home theather receiver that has a nice D/A chip ♥).  You also need a PCIe x16 slot for a graphics card, and 2 regular PCI slots for your TV tuners, and SATA slots for your hard drives.  You also want a passive cooler on what it commonly known as the "north-bridge" chip.  For a socket 939 board, I find Gigabyte technologies to be the best maker of quiet (fanless) yet capable (digital sound output) motherboards -- the Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 Socket 939 is a great model.  On my PC, I used the predecessor to this board, the GA-K8N Ultra-9 -- but now something just as capable, yet less expensive, is available, and we once again bow to the wonders of the pace of technology.

Now you need to get yourself a power supply.  Again, you're looking for something quiet -- but the dirty secret about power supplies is that what you're really looking for is something very efficient.  This is because an efficient power supply uses more energy simply to deliver energy to the computer, instead of delivering energy into the air in the form of heat.

There are a few fanless power supplies available on the market, but these are also problematic because a large portion of the design of most cases assumes that the power supply will be pulling a large amount of air out through it's fan.  If you get a fanless power supply, you break that assumption -- the end result is that your case is no longer a case -- it's a silicon baking factory.

So what you really want is a power supply that is able to move air -- but do it at a low noise level -- and this means you're looking for a power supply with a large fan.  Efficiency + a large fan, and you've got the power supply you want.  You will also need a power supply that can deliver 350 watts or more -- you will have your CPU (50 watts), your motherboard and memory (~40 watts), 2 big hard disks (~80 watts) + other items, and some headroom.  I highly recommend the power supplies made by seasonic, which are efficient and quiet, and still move enough air through your case to keep everything else happy and reasonably cool.  The particular model I use is the S12-380 supply.

Now, you need to choose a video card.  Remember, what you're looking for is something that will play back your HDTV ok, and something that won't heat up your case too much or make a whole bunch of noise.  Maybe you'll want something to allow you to play a few games on the PC -- but many cutting edge games don't work too well on the Media Center Edition of windows, so you really don't need the latest greatest 3D processors.

My suggestion is to go for a quiet card -- a fanless GPU card will do quite nicely.  The best purveyors of such quiet cards again happens to be Gigabyte technologies.  I can highly recommend the GV-NX66128DP model (pictured) which you can purchase at ZipZoomFly -- and if you're looking for more gaming performance, you could try the GV-NX66T128VP or perhaps the much more powerful (but much larger -- you'll have to make sure it fits in the case) GV-NX76T256D-RH but I have never tested this card/GPU (it's based on NVIDIA's GeForce 7600 GT as opposed to the other 2 cards based upon the GeForce 6600 and 6600 GT).

Now it's time to get some memory and disk for your HTPC. You'll probably want 1GB of memory (and if you're using socket 939, this will be 184-pin DDR400 memory, otherwise known as PC3200). Get this as 2 sticks of 512MB RAM -- the vendor probably isn't that important for this PC, you basically want 1 GB of el-cheapo memory. Of course, it *will* help your machine a little bit if the memory comes with heat sinks on it, so getting the cheapest sticks that have heat spreaders might be wise. Here's a good example, some OCZ memory that has heatspreaders, 1BG in 2 sticks to be had for $70.99 *(at the time I write this) after a rebate.

After you get your memory, now you want to buy some disk. Your case has room for 3 hard drives (in a squeeze) but 2 fit comfortably. You basically want as much storage as you can buy -- but again you want to consider noise as a major factor in your purchasing decision. Based upon noise output alone, I highly recommend Samsung's line of SATA hard drives. However, they are slightly outdated (they have lower capacities) and Silent PC Review recently reviewed a large capacity Western Digital drive which measured as a very quiet hard drive. For a tried and trusted pair of silent drives, pick up a pair of Samsung SP2504C drives to give yourself 500 GB of storage (enough for about 200 hours of high quality television, plus an entire library of 500 CD's ripped in lossless audio format, plus all the pictures you've ever taken on your digital camera).

When choosing how you're going to use your Media Center PC for viewing television, you have to ask yourself a few questions:

1. Do I have a single cable box? Or do I either have multiple cable boxes, or a cable box + sattelite box?
2. Can I get over the air HDTV reception where I live?

First of all, you really need to get a TV Tuner card regardless of the answers to any of the above questions. The only real question is whether or not to get a card that has one tuner, or two.

If you have more than one source for regular TV (from question 1 above) then you only need a single TV Tuner. If you either have 2 sources, or are even considering getting a second cable box or second source, you should get a card that has 2 tuners in it.

I have found cards from Hauppauge to be very reliable, they work well within Windows MCE. If you only need one tuner, go for the WinTV-PVR-150 MCE, and if you are going to get 2 tuners, you need the WinTV-PVR-500 MCE.

If you have a very modern motherboard which does not have PCI slots -- and only has PCIe x1 slots -- you can't use a Hauppauge card -- You'll need to find the PCIe version of the TheaterPro 550 from PowerColor.

If you can possibly get over-the-air HDTV reception, I say it's definitely worth buying an HDTV tuner card. Stay away from ATI's HDTV Wonder card -- I installed this card into my first HTPC build and it blue-screened the box until I removed it physically from the card slot. Many hours of debugging showed that it was probably a conflict with the NVidia 6600 graphics card I had in the system -- more troubling was that ATI was completely unwilling to help diagnose the problem at all. Beware and stay away from that card.

A much better option is the FusionHDTV5 series of cards from the Korean company DVICO. The cards, first and foremost, actually seem to work. Secondly, they use a next generation HDTV tuner which does better with multipath rejection, which is very important if you live near any large buildings. They also now have a PCIe version of the card as well. Get yours here!

Recently, it has become apparent that it will be very difficult for the near-term to get a Do-it-yourself HTPC working with CABLECard (which is what will let you get HDTV over your cable into the HTPC). The Cable Companies are making it very difficult to allow this to happen -- they are scared you'll record every movie on HBO in Hi-Def and then post it onto YouTube.

If Hi-Def cable TV is a must for you, your best option is to wait for Windows Vista -- and then buy a pre-built HTPC from a large manufacturer that is certified as "Digital Cable Ready". There are some helpful articles here and here describing this. Of course, if I figure out how to upgrade a home-built HTPC to get CABLECard content, I'll post it here!

For most things that you need to do with your HTPC, using the Windows Media Remote control will suffice. However, there are a few activities which are much more convenient when using a keyboard.

You need a wireless keyboard (preferably RF instead of IR so that you don't have a line-of-sight IR transmission restriction) that has an integrated mouse. Why? So that you can sit on the couch and type away. You'll really appreciate a decent keyboard when you're trying to correct the spelling of a CD Artist, or labeling a folder where you're downloading all of those pictures you took in Vegas from your memory card into the PC.

I've finally found a good keyboard, a wireless keyboard with a touchpad mouse made by Adesso. This thing transmits through at least 2 NY apartment walls with no trouble (I actually tested this), does not miss keystrokes, and is small enough and pleasant looking enough to camp on top of the HTPC without making things look cluttered. The only downside is the fairly high price, but its worth the money and you can get a shiny new one from NewEgg.