0DIY HTPC Media Center PC

Fol­low­ing on from pre­vi­ous posts about my HTPC I thought I’d provide a list of what I built it with for any­one else inter­ested in build­ing a sim­il­ar machine

	Com­pon­ent Details	Price	Notes
CPU	Intel Pen­ti­um Dual-Core E6300 @ 2.80GHz	£60	Still more than fast enough
CPU Cooler	Scythe Ninja	£35
Mobo	Giga­byte GA-EG41MF-US2H	£50	Does the job, and fits in uATX cases. Might be worth repla­cing chip­set heatsink
Memory	2x 1Gig Cor­sair DDR2-800	£30
GPU	Radeon HD5450	£35	Pass­ive, cheap and sup­ports DXVA hard­ware accel­er­ated video playback.
HDD	WD 750Gb	£45	Used because it was spare. Gen­er­ally I recom­mend any quiet drives
Optic­al	DVD-RW 16x	£15	Will soon be replaced with a BluRay reader
Sound	onboard		A future upgrade will replace the onboard sound with a mod­ded high qual­ity soundcard
Case	Antec NSK2400	£65	Small, attract­ive, with room for stand­ard size components
PSU	inc. with Case
Freeview	Pin­nacle PCTV PCI-E 3010ix	£25	Not very easy to find, and drivers for Win7 are sketchy. Recom­mend alternative
Freesat	Compro Video­Mate S350 PCI	£25	Very cheap, but its only a single tuner, a twin tuner, or a second card is recommended
Remote	n/a
OS	Win­dows 7 x64	£50	I got this cheap as an upgrade offer as a student
TOTAL		£435

Oth­er items you may want to con­sider are…
Bun­gee rope for mount­ing the HDD
Case fans (e.g. the Nex­us D12SL 120mm fan)
Chip­set heat­sink (e.g. Thermal­right HR-05)
Decent Remote con­trol, if you can find one

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