I've been a computer nerd since age 8, and I just turned 40. When all is said and done, I have a new always-on, does-anything home theater box that is twice as fast as the one I built in 2008, while consuming less than half the power. Or as I like to call it: the future, unless the media congolomerates with vaults full of cash manage to subvert net neutrality.) I've cancelled cable altogether I'd rather take that $60+ per month and use it to support innovative companies who will deliver media through the internet, like Netflix, Hulu, etcetera. All modern cable is now digital, which means awkward DRM-ed up the wazoo CableCard systems. (Also, in case you're wondering, I intentionally dropped the analog cable tuner. And it compromises almost nothing in performance, with a Windows Experience score of 5.1 - that would be a solid 5.8 if you factored out desktop Aero performance. Spoiler: they loved the hell out of it too. There is an excruciatingly in-depth review of essentially the same system at Missing Remote, with a particular eye toward home theater duties. This is a killer setup, but don't take my word for it. That got the idle power down from 22 watts to 17 watts, a solid savings of 22%. ( Update: I ended up replacing my old Seasonic ECO 300 SFX power supply with a Pico PSU-90 plus 60 watt adapter kit. Under full, artificial multithreaded Prime95 load, it tops out at an absolute peak of 55 watts. This little box is remarkably efficient even when playing back a 1080p video it's not unusual to see CPU usage well under 50%, which equates to around 30-35 watts in practice. To be fair, it's more like 25 watts idle with torrents in the background. I know I get way too excited about this stuff, but … holy crap, 22 tesla-lovin' watts at idle! My results? I'll just get right to the good part, but please bear in mind each step is about twice as powerful as the one before: Just assemble it, install your OS of choice (sorry, Apple fans), then plug it into your receiver and television and boot it up. It's delightfully simple to build and downright cheap. The magical part here is the extreme level of hardware integration: the CPU has a GPU and memory controller on die, and the motherboard has optical digital out and HDMI out built in. You also might want to add a Blu-Ray drive, and perhaps a Windows 7 Home Premium license ($99) for its excellent 10-foot Windows Media Center interface. I'm including the fuller part list as courtesy recommendations in case you're starting from scratch. I didn't actually buy a case, PSU, or even hard drive for that matter I recycled many of my old existing parts, so my personal outlay was all of 300 bucks. This is just the basic level of hardware to get a functional home theater PC. Combine that with a decent Mini-ITX motherboard and a few other essential parts, and you're good to go: The low power Core i3-2100T is the one I had my eye on, with a miserly TDP of 35 watts. Now that Intel has finally released their Sandy Bridge CPUs - the first with integrated GPUs - I was eager to revisit and rebuild. (Megamind is hilarious and highly recommended, by the way it's far better than its Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes percentages would seem to indicate.) When I recently had to transcode Megamind down to 720p to get it to play back without stuttering or pausing at times… I knew my current HTPC's days were numbered. Only the finest in children's entertainment for my spawned process, I say! And when you have a toddler in the house, believe me, you need reliable 1080p playback. My old low-power Athlon X2 based HTPC generally worked great, but still struggled with some occasional 1080p content. I only want one PC in my house on all the time, and I want it to be as efficient and versatile as possible. As I get older, I find that I'm no longer interested in having a home full of PCs whirring away. I adore that little machine it drives all of our family entertainment and serves as a general purpose home media server and streaming box. It's been almost three years since I built my home theater PC.
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