Building an HTPC: Planning, Part Picking & Building

Today, most of us are always on the hunt for tools that can make our lives easier. Enter the HTPC. We have the Internet, movies and photos on our phones – why not on our TVs? Come along on a voyage of technological discovery that is fraught with peril, as we cover the good and potentially bad of building one of these handy systems.

Two or three years ago you would’ve been hard-pressed to find me even entertaining the idea of owning a home theater PC (HTPC), but then I bought a house and all bets were off – I just had to have one!

Clearly, I’m not alone given the hardware available today that caters to this ever-growing market segment. There’s everything from super small all-in-one systems, to feature-rich mITX motherboards, to ultra-low profile enthusiast CPU coolers, to cases that would look right at home beside stereo components – all at prices that allow folks to enter the scene at a fraction of the cost compared to even 2 years ago.

And why wouldn’t you want to? I know that having an HTPC for our weekly family movie night would be more cost-effective than burning a stack of disks, and we’d all be more comfortable in the living room instead of huddled around a 22″ monitor in the office. Ok, so things aren’t that bad since we can just copy files to a flash drive, plug it into the TV and go, but hopefully you see my point. It’s all about accessibility and convenience.

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