HTPC Building Series: Laying out all the components

Check out our HTPC on a Budget series and join us in building a great HTPC for under $1,000.

In our quest to build the ultimate inexpensive hoome theater computer, we’ve walked you through selecting all the major components that will power our labor of love PC. I’m talking about things like why we picked our chosen motherboard, the MSI MS-7411, a look at how we will drive 7.1 sound from the HTPC to our receiver, and the smart way that we will move content to the HTPC so it’s displayed on our television.

But what about the rest? The pieces that, although not major, are still required to have a - you know - functioning HTPC? Well, that’s where this article comes in. We are going to be giving you a quick rundown of the smaller components that you will need in order to get this thing built, before we do our wrap-up in our next article.

CASE: Antec Fusion Version 2 (V2)
the Antec Fusion offers two 3.5? bays for hard drive, one 5.25? exposed, a VFD, IR receiver, and potential for very low noise cooling via its side-mounted 120mm fans. The 120mm fans are very well positioned to pull air off of the CPU heatsink, which is something low-noise builders will want to take advantage of.

OPTICAL DRIVE: LG GGC-H20L
Since we are focused on cost, we are going to go with a Blu-ray reader, and we’ve chosen the LG GGC-H20L. You are gonna want Blu-ray capabilities with this computer.

MEMORY: 2GB DDR2-800
RAM is very inexpensive, but we are keeping the price down by only going with two 1GB sticks of RAM. This should only cost about $20, depending on where you end up.

VIDEO CARD: None
The motherboard that was chose in a previous article is more than adequate, since we are focusing exclusively on television and movies, along with other basic computing tasks. We aren’t doing any graphics intensive gaming, so we don’t need a separate video card.

PROCESSOR: AMD Athlon X2 5200+
We chose a chip that, again, is more than enough for the tasks that we are going to throw at it. The processor runs cool, which means your fans won’t be going at full speed (which means a quiter room) and it goes nicely with our chosen motherboard.

In our next piece, we price everything out, and see how close we came to the $1,000 target - think we made it?

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