The personal computer has taken on a new role in the home. No longer a box sitting in the corner stuck to a little monitor, or a laptop with limited features and graphics capabilities; the center piece of the living room is the HTPC. Recipe for success = HTPC + greater than 40 inch LCD or Plasma television.
This wonderful little machine, assembled and integrated in one evening, not only plays blue-ray movies in 1080p, but also streams high definition televison shows and movies off of the internet, surfs the web, accesses email, crunches spreadsheets, plays and records music, etc.
Bill of Material:
1) Gigabyte AMD micro-ATX motherboard with 780G on-board video and HDMI ($65)
2) AMD dual core 5050e Brisbane CPU - 2.6GHz and 45W ($60)
3) Lian Li HTPC case from scary anglo guy with dreadlocks on Craiglist ($50)
4) 4 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 RAM ($40)
5) 400W Corsair >80% efficient Power Supply Unit ($40)
6) 320 GB Western Digital 16MB cache SATA hard drive ($55)
7) LG Blue-ray/HD DVD ROM and 16X DVD Burner SATA ($110)
8) Encore Wireless-N PCI adaptor ($25)
Total cost ~$450 and you can watch/record movies on it!!
Seems like all the prices went up..lol
Posted by: J-Syn | October 12, 2009 at 03:18 PM
Memory has sky-rocketed. Those 4gb are now over $100!
Posted by: Paul Stanley | February 19, 2010 at 07:45 PM
The case and ram are the only 2 items still available from NewEgg. Everything else has been discontinued.
Posted by: Russell | September 24, 2011 at 09:58 AM