My First HTPC (early 2005)
Half Life 2 just came out and my 4 year old Gateway computer wasn’t going to cut it. I’m a huge Half Life fan so I decided to build a HTPC for it … even though I was still in the TV-on-a-box days. Technically speaking, I guess the new HTPC was more of a regular PC since it was in my office, but I made sure I could use it as an HTPC in the future when I upgraded my home theater.
Here are some of the components of my first HTPC:
- AMD 64 3500+ Athlon processor
- Asus A8V Delux motherboard
- Cooler Master Wave Master TAC-T01-E1C Silver Mini Tower
- ATI Radeon X800 Pro with 256MB of RAM
- 200 GB hard drives (x2)
- 512 MB Ram (x2)
- MyHD MDP-130 capture card
- Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and mouse
It’s been a couple years so I don’t remember all the details on why I purchased certain components. I know price was certainly an issue, and I also remember reading lots of reviews. Most of the reviews said that an AMD Athlon processor with an ATI video card worked best with Half Life, so I was sold.
Aesthetics is important in a home theater room so I couldn’t just use a regular computer case. I absolutely loved the horizontal HTPC cases with touch screen LCDs on the front. However, they were way too expensive so I went with the Cooler Master case. It’s a tower-based case so it may not look right in everyone’s home theater, but I knew I would have enough floor space. I also liked the way the front of the case looked with the blue LED glow.
Building the HTPC went without a hitch. I had the hard drives setup in a RAID 0 configuration to help speed things up, and I had no problems installing the motherboard and processor. I was a little worried about installing Windows XP onto RAID 0 drives since I never done it before, but the install went without a hitch too.
I picked the MyHD MDP-130 capture card over other HD capture cards because it had built-in hardware encoding capabilities. Some of the other HD capture cards use the processor to compress video, which would be a problem if I was recording something and upscaling a DVD at the same time.
In the end, the HTPC without a home theater played great. I was able to see the resolution, details, and textures without any frame jitter.
I’ll go through connecting my HTPC to my HDTV in another post in another day.
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