Everyone watches TV. In some form or the other.
There are multiple ways for a person to watch TV today – Internet has become an important source for daily consumption – whether YouTUBE or Netflix or something like that. In these scenarios, getting a smart TV with in built applications is a useful investment in case this is your first TV or if you are changing your TV after a long time.
What if you just bought a non-Smart TV, like me, and want to watch my daily dose of HIMYM or The Big Bang Theory? You either buy a decoder from du/Etisalat/Carrefour, find the right place to tune into and voila, you are watching TV. But this is still only the “newer” content. What about older episodes? Download them from the internet (everyone does this) and watch them on your laptop/computer. You could, however, get a WD TV Live Media Centre, and it will serve you a lot of good if your interests are limited to only movies, music and tv shows. Read more about that here.
One more but – But if you are like me, and love gaming, then just a SMART TV and/or a Media Center is not going to be enough. You need some serious power.
I had the good fortune of being able to do JUST that. I collected parts from various places and put together a Home Theater PC – shortened to HTPC. I can now watch my movies / tv shows, listen to music, surf the internet, stream online content, video conference, and PLAY FULL HD games – all on my 32 inch Sony TV 🙂
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All you need is the power to compute what I put into it. The list and the reasons are put below:
1. The case – you need something with space and breathing room. I chose the CoolerMaster SNIPER – AMD Black Edition. It is spacious and has superb expansion capability. It is tough, large, and good looking. Here is the CoolerMaster website gallery for you to drool over. Here is a side profile of the case:Â
2. The Motherboard and CPU: You need a motherboard with some sort of oomph, but does not burn a hole through the pocket. The ASUSÂ F2A85-M PRO motherboard was a good pick since it supported the APU Chip from AMD and has on board HD graphics and 2.1 Surround Sound support. I had the AMD A8 chip, and it has enough compute to run some cool games at mid-spec without any GPU. Here is the spec on the motherboard. Read more about the A-Series of APUs from AMD here.
3. The RAM: Now I had the choice to pick up some cheap RAM. But would I? No chance. So I scouted around. And I looked around some more. I spoke to a friend who said that he had bought some RAM for himself by GEiL. I looked it up, and the Veloce type of RAM looked pretty cool. So I requisitioned 8GB for myself and installed this in my machine. I may up the ante someday but so far 8GB is alright. Here is the website to look up the information about the RAM I am using.
4. The Drives: For my HDD – I picked up a standard 500GB Seagate Hard Drive. Someday I will get a Western Digital Black drive, but that is someday. For my Optical Drive, I chose to install a Buffalo Internal Blu-Ray drive. Now my machine can retire my intention to buy a PS3 because I was thinking of buying one for the BluRay only. I managed to get my hands on an 8X Writer which meant that if ever I wanted to, I could back up my entire PC onto BluRay discs. The Buffalo Blu Ray has given me an opportunity to watch Avatar, The Avengers and many other movies in 1080P on my screen without havnig to worry about how would I play it! 🙂 More information on the BluRay Writer, here. It is a PDF so right-click to save it if you please 🙂
5. The other important appendages; Cooling and Power. I bought CoolerMaster for both since the product was best suited for the case I had with me. Now the Bronze 650W Power Supply I have is enough to power the mother board, up to 4 drives, and a single GPU with no hassle. The Heat Sync for the APU was also CoolerMaster, and I went for one that would keep the temperature low while keeping noise to a minimum as well. The Fan/Sync combo works wonders and I am able to get a lot of work out of that A8 APU.
6. THE GPU: Initially, I had a HIS RAdeon 5670 HD Graphics Card – powered directly by the mother board. It’s good enough to play some older games, and even play movies at 2HD (read: 2160x#) resolutions but not for serious gaming post 2012. SO I immediately traded in for an older unit of Radeon built 7990. Now I can kick some alien backside in Crysis 3 at max settings and not break a sweat. Loving the graphic love.
I could connect the PC to a Home Theater for better sound effects, but my son like poking holes int he speakers, so I decided to keep that on hold till I can tell him why he should not do that.
If you like this setup, let me know and I can hook your HTPC up in a week, save you some money and give you the pleasure of having a home built monster for your media and gaming. I also intended to buy a Logitech Wireless TrackPad Keyboard, but I had enough Wired Gaming Keyboard and Mice – so I gave up on that idea.
Check out the public photo album of my HTPC here on Facebook.
Share your feedback with me about what you thought of this build.
Thanks for reading.
