My Home Theater PC (HTPC) was a project I actually completed a couple months ago, but have been too busy enjoying it to write about it. It’s possibly the coolest home theater accessory you can have these days, given the wide adoption of Hulu, YouTube, and the injection of HD content. These days, having a PC in your living room, with your TV as a monitor, is becoming more commonplace.
Having a PC sitting in your living room has its advantages not only in showing videos, but also in streaming music for parties, showing picture slideshows with friends, playing games, or simply browsing the web. Your TV doubles as a full-fledged PC, so anything you want to do on a PC, you can do in your living room.
With my setup, I had to go with a wireless solution. I have a large media drive sitting on our network that shares not only media with all our home PCs, but backups and software repositories too. I couldn’t move the drive to the HTPC, as it would not always be on, nor could I hard-wire it due to difficulties in stringing wires. A 5Ghz 802.11N setup was my only option to take advantage of both the uncrowded 5Ghz spectrum as well as the larger bandwidth.
HTPC Specs
- APEX Mini-ITX case w/ 250w PSU
- AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5Ghz dual-core CPU
- Zotac Nvidia 8200 Mini-ITX AMD motherboard
- Crucial 2GB DDR2 800 RAM
- Western Digital 80GB 7200 RPM SATA HDD
- Silverstone low profile 80mm CPU cooler
- LITE-ON DVD ROM
- Linksys WGA600N dual-band 802.11N gaming adapter
- Rocketfish Bluetooth keyboard/mouse
- 47″ LG 1080p LCD TV (47LG50)
Server & Network Specs
Not technically part of the HTPC build itself, but worth mentioning as part of the setup.
- Old HP server – Windows 2003 R2, 1.8Ghz Celeron, 2GB RAM (ol’ timer)
- Linksys WRT610N dual-band 802.11N wireless router
- Media storage – 1TB eSATA Fantom external HDD
- Rosewill 1.5Gb/s eSATA PCI card
Thoughts
The assembly itself was pretty smooth. Everything popped together within about half an hour. Only issue I had was due to the cramped case size. While trying to mount the HDD, the SATA cable was sitting on top of the CPU fan, nearly in the blades. Mounting it a little bit further out worked out just fine
I loaded up Vista Home Premium to not only take advantage of the extra eye candy and better support for Bluetooth, but because Vista has better support for large fonts, which is a must when sitting 10+ feet away. The PC itself connects to the TV via the DVI-to-HDMI output. Thankfully, the Nvidia chipset supports transmitting the audio as well as the video over the DVI output.
All media is stored on a shared network drive, which is why I opted for the smaller drive. The WGA600N gaming adapter connects to my WRT610N dual-band 802.11N router, which connects to my home server. The gaming adapter is a better choice than my previous WUSB600N dual-band USB adapter due to Window’s WIFI background scanning that occurs every 60 seconds. This behavior caused random sputters in streaming video. The gaming adapter connects via ethernet so video streaming is 100% smooth, especially by using the uncrowded 5Ghz spectrum.
Overall, the experience of picking out parts, putting it together, and even troubleshooting was both rewarding and enjoyable. I’m looking forward to building a faster home server as my next project.
If anyone has any questions, please leave a comment.
