Home Theater PC
Recently Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame, updated his Home Theater PC. I had been thinking of doing the same, so below is my experience.
| CPU | Intel Core i3-2100 |
| Motherboard | MSi H67MA-E45 |
| Memory | Kingston 4GB DDR3 |
Standard case + power supply. I also added a 2TB hard drive + a Blueray writer.
Total damage: $800
Originally I installed Windows 7 Home Premium but had a few driver problems.
So I started again with Windows 7 Home Premium N and no problems.
How does it rate next to Jeffs’? 
Jeff managed a 5.1 – but I agree, take out the Aero desktop support and you have a 5.8 machine!
Interesting, Jeff got me all inspired when he started to talk about power consumption. He has been writing about this for sometime now. When I tested this machine, it was just under 40 watts.
I have no idea how Jeff pulled off 22 watts, but he did say that he recycled old parts from a previous build.
I’m not too worried since a) this machine will be either in stand-by or turned off when not in use and b) a low power consumption device is going to increase the cost significantly.
For well under $AUD1,000 I’m only annoyed I didn’t do this sooner!