Some of you may have heard about HTPC’s and some of you may not. Basically, HTPC stands for Home Theatre Personal Computer and they give you a lot of multimedia functionality right in your living room that you wouldn’t get from your standard DVD player. You can watch DVD’s, videos you have downloaded, watch and record television, listen to mp3’s and CD’s and watch Blu-Ray movies without needing a separate expensive player.  I’m going to give you a quick guide on how to build one of these bad boys without breaking the bank.

Components

First off, you may have this running 24/7, so you don’t want something that’s going to chew a lot of power. This as well as cost will be the main considerations when choosing components.

CPU. We want something low powered, but with enough grunt that it will do everything you will need. At present, I recommend the low-powered AMD dual core processors. Looking at the AMD Athlon X2 5050e which is rated at a max power consumption of 45w and is dual core so it has plenty of grunt. Plus they’re quite cheap.

Motherboard & Chipset. Pretty much you want a board based on the AMD 780G chipset or higher. This board has the advantage of having an onboard graphics card powerful enough to decode all your Blu-Ray movies and has the advantage of allowing the HDMI output to send audio along the cable along with the video. A lot of boards based on other chipsets will NOT send audio as well, so watch out for this. Note you don’t need the really expensive boards, usually something around the $100 mark will give you all the features you will need.

RAM. This isn’t a high performance gaming machine, so you can stick whatever the cheapest DDR2 ram you can find into it. At a minimum I would say 2gb of ram to run smoothly. You can of course add more if you want.

Power Supply. Don’t be tempted to cheap out on this component. You want to look for something that will give you 400w of rated power or more, and you want it to have an 80%+ efficiency rating. The computer should use no where near the 400w or more but having extra capacity means it can run  quieter as it is under less load.

TV Tuner. If you only occasionally watch the odd show then you can get away with a single tuner card. This will allow you to record the odd show for watching later. I would recommend having a Dual tuner though, as this allows you to record 2 channels at once, or record 1 and watch another if you so wish. You need one that is dual digital tuners. Usually they will say Dual DVB-T or in some countries Dual DVB-S. What standard you need depends on what they broadcast in your country. I’m from Australia and here we broadcast in DVB-T. There are cheap options available that work rather well, so do some reading and shop around. For a single tuner I don’t think you can go past the Leadtek DTV-1000s. It’s cheap, works brilliantly and can even let you input things like vcr’s so you can record them to digital with the right software. For dual tuners there are lots of options. Shop around and read reviews.

Hard Drive. You can get away with one hard drive, but I would recommend at least 2. I’d recommend looking at the Western Digital 1TB Green Power hard drives. They’re cheap, consume less power than a normal hard drive and let you store a lot of data. Handy if you have large video or music collections and you like to record TV.

Video Card. If you’re not planning to play games on the computer, then the onboard video card will be 100% fine. If you do want to turn it into a gaming console as well then you’ll most likely need another graphics card that can handle a bigger load. Generally I recommend the ATI graphics cards as they can send audio over HDMI without having to fiddle around with extra cables inside the case. At present, I’d be looking at a HD4650 or a HD4670. The 4650 consumes less power than the 4670, but it is a little slower so it’s up to you. Both of these should play the latest games at an acceptable level and are both available as passively cooled options. Good for low noise.

Blu-Ray Drive. Depending on your needs there are a few options here. Most people would only need a Blu-Ray playing drive and Pioneer and LG make good budget orientated drives that work well. Shouldn’t really be paying much over $150 AUD for one of these.

Computer Case. If you’re looking for the cheap option, you can grab whatever cheap ATX computer case that you can find and use that. There are proper HTPC styled cases around though that might look more at home with any other hi-fi equipment you already have so you could check out some of those.

Software. Purely for ease of use I highly recommend either Windows Vista home premium or the recently released Windows 7 home premium. Both come bundled with Windows Media Centre which is by far the easiest and quickest way to get going. There are other options available, but they’re no where as simple as Media Centre to get going properly. This can play all your DVD’s and mp3 files. To play Divx and h.264 files you’ll need a plug-in for it. I Highly recommend one called Media Control along with the K-Lite codec pack. For Blu-Ray playback there’s really only 2 options. You have Power DVD or Total Media Theatre. Both work well, but I am partial to Total media Theatre due to it’s integration with Media Centre.

Inputs: I’d grab a cheap wireless mouse and KB bundle, probably Microsoft or Logitech. What you really need though in a Media Centre remote control. If you can track down an official Microsoft one get it. It’s brilliant. If you can’t, I highly recommend the clone made by Hauppauge. The remote makes all the difference.