Was waiting for Randy to take the leap and build his HTPC so I would have a good system to copy. After an upgrade on a gaming puter here a few weeks ago and looking at the spare parts we have stored away, guess its time to build a new box.

Ordered the Ahanix MCE601 this evening as I found a good sale price on it, and it will blend in well in the racks with the Halos and the pair of Pure Av.



Hardware on hand that will be used are an AMD Athlon 64 2.2 gig, MSI K8N Neo Platium board, one gig of PC3200 Corsair, nVidia GeForce 6800.
Will make decisions on the hard drive and player in the next few days, at the present think we will try out MCE2005 and see how it preforms. This new box will go in the rack system using wireless to the house network, all of the MP3 files will now be on a dedicated and faster machine, allowing the Squeezebox to be relocated to the bedroom system.
Any suggestions or expierance with an HTPC will be appreciated, as this will be a new adventure.

Until a couple of days ago I never heard of HTPC but I was planning on hooking one of my PC's up in my HT.
What would it cost for a nice HTPC?
What makes the HTPC different from the regular PC?

The simple things are :

- it usually runs the Media Center Edition version of Windows XP rather than the normal version

- it needs a graphics card with video ins and outs, like an All-in-Wonder

- it needs a good sound card with digital (spdif) out

Other stuff often includes fast hard disks for storing and streaming video content, a spiffy looking box to fit into the living room decor, and a bunch of low-power-when-idle requirements which I expect everyone ignores in the real world.

Just to add one small point to John's excellent answer, I think most HTPCs are also designed to run very quiet.... no distracting fan noise!

Ok what would it cost for a nice HTPC?

>>I think most HTPCs are also designed to run very quiet....

Ah yes, good point. I probably would not have been very happy with my first HTPC

I wouldn't necessarily say that it runs XP MCE. There are an awful lot of Linux based HTPCs out there.

Don't go saying that...................................... I already have that discusion going on here with the puter geeks. Needless to say the OS is not ordered yet.

Interesting. I wondered about Linux when I was posting but I hadn't seen any Linux HTPCs around here...

As for the reasons for building the HTPC, the comments by others have covered most of it. As I said, we have spare parts, it could reduce the amount of components in the rack systems, less power/heat, and I'm already funding the electric company to much. Will also allow PC gaming on the Sony 60", and I will have all music and video in one menu.