[Pussa]

I started looking into building an HTPC from new parts in Novemeber last year. I slowly built it up as I got paid until I had everything I required in about March this year. I ended up with the following:

Antec Overture II Case
ASUS A8N-VM CSM Motherboard
Western Digital 200GB SATA
IBM DeskStar 120GB IDE
GeIL 1GB RAM
Dvico Fusion HDTV DVT-B Dual Digital
MS MCE IR Keyboard
MS MCE Remote
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU (My first AMD box)
Pioneer 110D DVD Writer - Silver
ASUS TV Out Module
ASUS SP/DIF Optical Module

Total cost $1,498

I'm running MCE 2005 complete with all patches, updates and rollups etc. It's taken a while to 'tweak' and there are a few outstanding things that need addressing but it's not giving me any grief. The real test was handing it over to my partner as the new solution for all things entertainment in the house and luckily it passed. I don't really have any regrets with my choices but I will add the following thoughts for anyone that's interested.

The motherboard is Micro-ATX but the case supports a full size ATX board. I got the case cheap and I like Antec cases so I decided to stick with it.

I know the Dvico Dual Digital is not a great choice (from the posts about this card over the past 6 months) but it was one of only 2 devices at the time that were "dual digital" and supported HDTV, even though I'm not using this capability yet. The only other one being the DigitalNow TwinHan DVB-T, but I wasn't keen on the idea of USB tuners. Only after did I realise that one tuner on the Dvico was USB anyway. In hindsight this card hasn't given me many problems so far so I can't really complain.

The pointer on the MCE keyboard does suck completely. I don't know how you can have this style of pointer work fine for years on laptops and then implement it on this keyboard only to have it almost completely useless. Maybe its to do with the fact it's IR??? So I do have a USB mouse plugged into the HTPC also but I rarely have to use it now it's all bedded in.

The 2 ASUS options (TV Out Module and SP/DIF Optical Module) took me weeks to track down. If anyone has the time I'd tell you what hoops I had to jump through to get them but I'll leave it off here for now.

I haven't looked at cooling the HTPC further as yet. It's not silent but it is pretty quiet. When the TV is running you can't hear it. I was considering buying a Creative X-Fi sound card for better quality audio but with the Optical Module for connection to my amplifier the sound seems great. I think I read from these forums that optical out audio is not processed using the on-board sound card and is delivered to the amp in it's original state. I am interested to know the reasons people have added expensive sound cards to their HTPC as an alternative to on-board audio.

I've connected the HTPC to my 76cm Sony Widescreen TV (KVHX32M31) via S-Video. The TV supports HD (to what extent I don't know i.e. native resolutions/ability to scale up etc.) but to use HD I have to go via the Component input. My HTPC has no component outputs and I don't feel that it's worth pursuing at this stage. Would be interested to hear from anyone else that has this TV and a HTPC connected up to it's HD inputs. I will end up hooking my HTPC up to a BenQ PE5120 projector via DVI when my theatre room is complete. The on-board Nvidia GF 6150 with DVI out was one of the original reasons for selecting this motherboard in the first place.

I've connected the Austar box (pay TV) up to the line in input on the Dvico card. I have Video in and Video out MCE shortcuts/scripts in the More Programs section that quits MCE and fires up DScaler to watch/record pay TV channels. I got these from TGB.com and have proved quite handy. I use a couple of scheduled tasks to execute .vbs scripts to start and stop recording Austar when I'm not around. Will be nice when MCE supports analogue inputs on Digital TV cards. Or even better, support for Digital TV cards and satellite cards together. And so the wish list grows. Did I mention PIP would also be nice?

The only plug-ins I currently run are My Movies (absolutely brilliant) and MCE Weather (not so handy when you have the weather channel available).

I subscribed to IceTV for EPG. It's pretty much hassle free which is what I was after.