Crappy Media Centre PC

Ahhh young Turks, entering the heady world of Media PC’s.

The Dutchman’s right that you need to make your case as quiet as can be, but in the long run I’d recommend a purpose build case as it’ll save you lots of hassle. Most of the stuff that you might need to buy will be here:

Quiet PC

I’d strongly recommend buying the coolest running pieces of equipment, even if that comes at the expense of performance. Media PC’s don’t need to be particularly powerful, so you might even want to underclock the CPU to make it run quieter.

Same goes for the GFX card, particularly if using a standard TV set as the standard definition TV signals are broadcast as an interlaced signal of 576 lines at 50 Hz frequency. I use an old ATI card with a TV out, which can run most games easily, since the res is so low. Obviously an HDTV will need a better output, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

Here’s a rundown of my media PC:

Case: SilverStone LC03S

Loads of space inside for plenty of airflow and space to mount 3.5 hard drives in 5.25″ bays in soundproofed enclosures.

CPU: Athlon 2100XP with one of these fellows attached:

Cooler: Zalman CNPS6000-ALCU (although thanks to the size of the case I’ve replaced the 92mm fan with a 120mm one and turned the speed of it down as much as possible. And it’s illuminated, which is a bit pointless.

Memory: 512mb

Hard Drives: I’ve got two HD’s – One is an old laptop HD (10Gb) which I just use for the OS and a couple of games and pieces of software. I’ve mounted it in a standard 3.5″ bay using trouser elastic, which means it’s virtually silent and doesn’t cause any noise through vibration. Then there’s an external full size HD which I can switch on and off (to keep the noise down), which I store my music and movies on. I plan to buy one of these to put inside though:

Scythe HD Silencer:

Motherboard (with onboard sound): Abit KT7 – MAX 2. Most importantly (for my audio setup) this board comes with an optical digital out for the sound which I can plug into the back of my amp.

I’ve got an old infra red keyboard attached, and the whole rig is connected to the internet. I’m planning on getting a TV card for it in the future, but for now I just use it as a games machine, or for looking up music videos and people hurting themselves on YouTube, when friends come over.

Also, here’s a handy link. It’s a list of all the companies that produce hardware supported by XP media edition.

using trouser elastic

😯 ROFL! We need photos.

To be honest, if you already have a decent PC, enough spare components to build a media PC and some kind of network switch, then you might as well just map to the hard drive on your main machine and play off that when you want to. Might not work so well with Hi Def movies, but it’s ideal for MP3’s or DivX films.

The most important thing though (IMO) is to make your media PC as quiet as possible. But for those of you with wives/girlfriends then you’ll eventually need to buy a decent looking case too, especially if it’s to go in a living room that looks like it came from the Ikea catalog. This might not be appreciated:

Here’s a good one if you’re on a budget:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=175090

You can buy passive CPU coolers these days as well as fanless PSU’s (although thses aren’t supposed to be that great). Instead, get one of these:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=396701

Not the best on the market, but pretty darned quiet and cheap.

A few other tips to keep the noise down are:

1) Use elastic to suspend your HDD’s so that no vibration is transferred to the case.

2) If you’re putting the PC in an audio cabinet, put lumps of blu-tac under each foot of the case. Again, this helps stop the vibrations being transmitted.

3) As most PSU exhausts face backwards, you can dampen the sound slightly by putting a thick piece of foam between it and the wall.