Time for the HTPC

I'm just starting my HTPC- I actually had a PC I bought well before I put up the first board for the home theater. I had bought a Shuttle with an nForce2 motherboard which had integrated graphics, optical output and still had room for a HDTV tuner card and aftermarket video card. However, Aidan has been using that as his personal PC and to be honest, it is pretty loud for a little PC. So, I'll pull out the TV tuner and I'll get set.

A little background for what I want:

• digital sound output (spdif)
• onboard graphics

My projector has multiple inputs, but rather than messing with its remote, I'd prefer to let my receiver do the video switching. Therefore, I want a motherboard (or mobo as those of us 'in the know' say) which can do component output. All my other PCs are AMD, so I'm leaning in that direction too. The new technology is the dual-core processors- of which Intel are leading in performance right now. But, I'm pretty sure that doesn't do much for purely viewing on my HTPC (I don't plan on doing encoding or other tasks which benefit from multiple cores). So, since the horsepower doesn't have to be that hot, I'm thinking I'll find a low-power single-core chip, which will certainly be well-priced since everything is dual-core these days. For RAM, I'd like to stick with DDR (since I can move it around to other PCs which are all DDR), but that's not a big consideration. The newer memory (DDR2) is the same price and will be a little more future-proof.

So, I'm going to start with the guts, and then find a case at some later point. One of the Home Theater Shackers, chasw98, did a similar setup in that he encoded his movies and put them on a file server. I have a giant PC case that I'll turn into a linux server for storing movies and other media, so a big case isn't required- hopefully, I can get away with one- or none hard drives.

Stay tuned!