Archive for October, 2010

[ad code=1 align=center]

With digital media beginning to take hold in the home, it’s important to consider the best ways to access that media. Many people now have dedicated media PC’s, either connected to a traditional monitor or to a big screen TV. The problem has always been that it’s inconvenient to have an ugly grey box sat in amongst your other home entertainment devices. As well as this, “normal” PC’s are loud, power hungry and take up an awful lot of space, hardly useful features when the main aim of the device is to let you access your media in your living room.

The solution is to create a PC that is small, quiet, draws as little power as possible and is yet affordable and can access all of your home media and display it on your TV or monitor. With a bit of careful planning this is entirely possible and in this walkthrough I’ll be demonstrating how you can achieve it for less than £200.

Hardware

There are some important choices to make when it comes to the hardware you need. You could go all out and spend hundreds of pounds on powerful processors and graphics cards, but for media playback only this isn’t required, you only need to spend that much money if you’re looking at using your PC for gaming, and that isn’t what we’re interested in here.

Motherboard

By far the best choice of motherboard at the moment is a board which features the Intel Atom line of processors and, if you want to playback HD quality video, the Nvidia Ion graphics chip. You can pick these boards up for around £120, or even less if you don’t need HD playback. Most of these boards will be in a form factor known as Mini-ITX which means that the entire motherboard will be 17cm x 17cm or less. This is a lot smaller than a traditional motherboards, which allows us to fit our components into a much smaller case.
Atom processors also draw a lot less power than traditional desktop processors, in fact an Intel Atom/Nvidia Ion motherboard shouldn’t draw any more than 30W of power. A lot of them also have a simple heatsink cooling the processor which means there are no noisy fans in your machine getting in the way of your music or videos.
Most of these motherboards come with connections aimed solely at home media use, the one I’m using has an HDMI port as well as optical and coaxial audio outputs so it could easily be connected to a surround sound speaker set up for high definition 5.1 audio.

Memory

Most Atom/Ion motherboards will use DDR2 memory, which is relatively cheap. You would be able to get by with 1GB, but for the minimal additional cost it’s worth shelling out for 2GB. It’s important to realise that the Nvidia Ion chip will also use this memory, up to 256MB of it, so 1GB would leave you with only 768MB for your operating system and applications to use.

Case

There are a growing number of bespoke Mini-ITX sized cases which make maximum use of the size of the motherboard to create a small, discrete solution which wouldn’t look out of place in the living room. It’s important to check if your chosen case comes with a power supply (most do) as it can be almost impossible to find a compatible power supply if they don’t.

When choosing your case you’ll need to consider which hard disks and optical drives you’ve chosen, as you’ll need to make sure that it has enough space to house all of your components. Places like www.ebuyer.com and www.mini-itx.com are good places to shop for cases, just remember that this PC is going to sit alongside your TV so make sure that you choose based upon aesthetics as well as compatibility.

Hard Disk

If you really want to create a silent, low power PC then the only thing to do is buy a Solid State Disk (SSD). These have no moving parts so are completely silent and draw a lot less power than a traditional hard disk. The only problem with them is the cost; they are ridiculously expensive when compared to traditional drives; a 32GB one has set me back £50 in this case. A traditional hard disk of the same price would carry probably 750GB of data.

What this means is that if you plan to store your data on this PC then you’re going to have to live with the additional power requirements and noise. But if you have all of your videos and music stored elsewhere (on another computer or on a network drive for instance) then 32GB is plenty for the operating system and programs so it may well be the best option.

Optical Drives

If you’re building a media PC then the chances are that you already have all your media saved on a hard disk somewhere, in which case you may not need an optical drive at all. In the software section I’ll show how you can install all of the software you need using a USB pen drive. If, however, you feel that you may need to read or write optical disks then you can pick up “laptop” style drives quite cheaply from the same stockists mentioned above.
Most cases will allow you to mount a slimline optical drive so it’s not necessarily a problem if you want one, but it will add to the cost, size and power requirements of your PC so give some thought as to whether or not you actually need one.

In the PC I’m building I have no need for an optical drive as all my media is stored on a networked hard disk, so I haven’t included one.

Assembly

Once you’ve purchased all of your hardware it shouldn’t be too difficult to assemble it (if you’ve built a PC before). In essence, the same standards and form factors are employed for Mini-ITX based systems as normal ones, things are just a little smaller. In the video below I’ve demonstrated the assembly of the parts into a working PC, ready to have it’s software installed.

At this point we have a fully assembled PC which meets the criteria we set out at the beginning: It’s small, draws a relatively small amount of power and it cost less than £200. The next step is to install software on this machine that will allow us to playback our media libraries as well as access online media from the likes of Youtube, BBC iPlayer and other online TV and radio services.