Choosing Components for a Blu-ray Home Theatre PC 

For this article series (and accompanying video series) we actually built a Blu-ray HTPC and this article discusses our hardware choices.

The Case 

The case used for the PC is an Antec Fusion black multimedia Micro-ATX form factor case. The top of the case slides off easily. Inside you can see 120mm fans, with speed control. The fans plug into the power supply, which is built into the case itself. The power supply is 430W.

The case has room for a couple of hard drives and one automatic pop-out plate for a ROM drive in the front. The hard drive area inside the case is properly ventilated to dissipate any heat generated. There are a couple of grommets on the hard-drive brackets, which prevent hard-drive noise or vibrations in the case - so you can watch a movie without listening to hard drives!

The case has a bracket at the side that holds all the cables neatly. All the cable ties are included in the case itself, so no more entangled wires! It’s a smart design.

Motherboard

We chose an EVGA motherboard with NVIDIA 630i chipset that has onboard graphics.

All of the cables that come with this board are classic black.

The motherboard has various video output connectors, optical audio, Gigabit LAN, firewire and four USB ports – everything you could need. It also has an LCD readout on the top of the board that gives BIOS information.

LCD Readout

 

CPU 

 

Hard-drive

We’ve chosen a hard-drive that has low-noise technology built into it. The terabyte of hard-drive space should be more than enough!

RAM

The RAM is 2GB of Corsair DDR2. It has a built-in LED display for quick testing and fault detection.

Optical Drive

Sony BD-ROM drive.

Operating System

The operating system we chose is Windows Vista Home Premium, 64-bit. It has Media Center built into it and is thus suitable for the multimedia Blu-ray HTPC. Media Center can also be used for recording digital TV.

Graphics Card

Across this article series we’ll give you feedback on testing various video card solutions including:

• Integrated 7150 GeForce 
• ATI HD 3450 (which costs around US$35)

 
NVIDIA NX 8500GT (which costs around US$50)



ATI Radeon HD 3870. This is a medium-high end graphics card. It has a noiseless fan.

Watch the video of this here.

Next: Installing the hardware