Building HTPC. Need advice.

Greetings all,

In preparation for finally upgrading to an HD set, I'm building this PC so I can take full advantage of it. However, I have the bulk of it done, but I need a second(or third) pair of eyes to confirm if I've missed anything. Here's the configuration:

Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W
Motherboard: Foxconn A78AX-S
Processor: AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz
Processor Cooling: SilenX IXC-92HA2
Memory: OCZ Platinum 2GB DDR2-800
HD: Western Digital 160GB SATA2
Graphics: EVGA Geforce 8800GT Superclocked
Graphics Cooling: SilenX IXG-80C
Optical: Lite-On Blu-ray Drive DH-4O1S

All of this will be going into an old Enermax Mid-Tower I have. The advice I need regards the mobo; I'm fairly certain it will be able to support the 2.1v the OCZ RAM needs, but what I'm not certain about is whether or not the SATA Blu-ray drive is going to be recognized. There are many reports of SATA optical drives not being seen by some boards, but I don't see any reviews of this particular board, and I can't find a list of the affected chipsets.

As for the rest of the setup, I'll just be praying the power supply and graphics card will fit in the old case and I won't need a new one.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Building HTPC. Need advice.

You're right, that's a pretty good deal. I think the best thing to do would be to buy the PC as is(plus the $10 DDR2-800 upgrade) and add the BD player/8800GT myself for around $300. I'll drop by Fry's in the next couple days to see if they have a better deal, but if not I'll probably go with the Dell.

After being drained from all the researching I was perilously close to scrapping the whole HTPC idea and buying a PS3. Not that the PS3 is a bad choice, but I'm fairly certain the next time I got the urge to play a PC game I'd be kicking myself.

Thanks, Seth!!! I'll post back with the results when I get everything up and running.

Now the only thing I have to be concerned about is whether the Dell might be too loud or not have the right connection for the PCIe card. and there was much rejoicing...

Re: Building HTPC. Need advice.

Well, my plans didn't work out so well. I went with your idea of buying a pre-built PC, except I went with the Compaq SR5550f, which was on sale at Fry's. I got home and began working on it, first by replacing the power supply(the 250W PS included didn't even have a PCIe connector). Luckily, I had one lying about, and it fit(just barely). Next up was the 8800GT and the BD-ROM drive. Everything was running smoothly and I thought I was home free when I loaded SpeedFan to check the temps: my shiny new GPU was a blazing 75C at idle(50C ambient)!

Since removing the side panels on the case had no effect, I was left with a few options: buy a new power supply with a bottom-mounted exhaust fan and/or replace the HSF on the card. Given that I was looking at another $100, I was trying to come up with alternate solutions, the most likely of which was transplanting everything into the old case I mentioned above. That, of course, wouldn't work, because the motherboard in this new system was micro-ATX, while my case was ATX only.

The reality was the Compaq case just didn't have the necessary ventilation for a high-powered GPU. So, after hours and hours of tinkering and finally coming to the conclusion this PC just wasn't going to work without more money, I decided to scrap the HTPC idea for now. I realized I only really wanted an HTPC on the off-chance I would want to play a PC game sometime in the near future, and it just wasn't worth the money. Besides, I had a brand new plasma TV sitting idle for days and I hadn't even started the software portion of the installation.

It was back to Fry's for me, this time to pick up a PS3. Read the manual, hooked it up and a minute later I had a 1080p signal showing up on my new TV. Beautiful!

I've definitely learned a valuable lesson from this: pre-built PCs are great, but only if they can do everything you need right out of the box; otherwise, a full DIY build is the way to go.