While there’s a lot of buzz around set top boxes and media receivers like the Boxee Box and Apple TV at the moment, for the widest choice of media center apps, file format support and upgradability, the home theatre PC (HTPC) is still your best option. Now you may remember the days of huge HTPCs, with massive fans and power consumption that would out a small town in the shade (literally). Thankfully, those days are behind us and here at WGS, we’ve reviewed a number of Intel Atom based nettops, which combined with NVIDIA’s ION GPU offer all the power you need to play high definition video in a tiny footprint.
Recently, I asked for some input on a proposed HTPC build. I received a fair amount of responses, and while I read each response carefully, I ended up getting pretty much what I had already researched. Sorry, guys. Good alternative suggestions, but the ATOM/ION route is too compelling for me.
The question now is whether I chose wisely or… not.
Unboxing (all) the Hardware
First, we have the components I purchased from Newegg: the motherboard, memory, and SSD.
A few close-ups of the G.Skill memory. Pretty packaging, heat spreaders, and sticker. I could have saved a few bucks and bought some memory without the heat spreaders, but those kind just look, well, naked! Hopefully, the heat spreaders do help dissipate the heat away from the memory chips.
Next, we have the Solid State Drive. As media will be stored on my home server, a 64 GB SSD should be more than sufficient.
Finally, we have the Jetway ITX motherboard/CPU/GPU combination. Once again, we have pretty consumer-style packaging,
followed by the miscellaneous contents,
and onto the heart of the build, the motherboard. Look, Ma, no fans! At least on the motherboard…
Next, we have the case for this build, a Norco ITX-7
which I reviewed earlier in this article.
