Components of a HTPC

I did a lot of research on what type of components are suitable to built a HTPC for my living room. It have been a while since I last built my own PC as the previous one was since 2002 using an AMD Anthon XP system with PC133 memory.

I have decided on to narrow down the components to the below items :-

• AMD motherboard with built-in ATI Radeon graphic card
• AMD Phenom II
• CPU HeatSink Fan (HSF) Cooler
• DDR3 memory, 4Gb
• 450-500W Power Supply
• Hauppauge Win-TV-PVR-150 Median Center Kit
• Wireless keyboard and mouse
• Large SATA-II hard disk
• DVD-RW 
• HTPC Chassis

AMD Motherboard and chipsets

The most important components is the motherboard, so I was choosing between Asus and Gigabyte. With the new release of the AMD 785G chipsets, I decide to use this as it have a newer ATI Radeon HD 4200 integrated 3D graphic card with 500Mhz clockspeed. Most of the brands comes with a 128Mb DDR3 sideport memory ( additional memory dedicated to the graphic card instead of using the main memory as video frame buffer ).

After doing my research, I have chosen Asus M4A785TD-V EVO, a full ATX board over the Gigabyte models. These two boards are quite similar but the Asus board is a full ATX board with more expansion slots ( 2 x PCIe x16,  1 x PCIe x1 & 3 PCI ).

And with the following back panel needed for a HTPC requirements, HDMI, DVI and VGA connectors for video and SPDIF for digital audio to the AV Receiver.

Nice thing about HDMI is that both digital video and audio are combined into a single cable to new Plasma or LCD tv with HDMI connectors. Newer Plasma / LCD models even have more than one HDMI input connectors. The AMD 785G chipsets support HDMI 1.3.