New Home Theater PC

I spent most of today making my Home Theater PC. I have been without a HTPC since I sold my last setup way back when. Of course the new HTPC is far more powerful than the unit it replaced. The system was put together with parts generously supplied by many of the companies that I deal with or have met throughout the years.

The system is based around a 50” plasma display by Vizio. This is by far the best bang for the buck plasma on the market today. The screen offers excellent color rendering and is super sharp when running Windows. The 1080i Vizio offers a host of digital and analog inputs as well as stereo speakers. What it doesn’t have is a tuner, but if you’re using HTPC, you won’t need one since the tuner is the computer.

This is the heart of the HTPC. The case is Thermaltake’s new Mozart. It works a lot better than the old HTPC case and I’m so glad Thermaltake was nice enough to send it to me. Otherwise I would have to email Cooler Master and I didn’t want that since I like Thermaltake’s CEO a lot more. The system inside the case is a mix-mash of stuff I had laying around – MSI motherboard with AMD Athlon 64 4000+ processor, 2GB of Kingston DDR RAM, Sapphire X1600 Pro video card and a 320GB Seagate hard drive.

The only thing that hasn’t change from the out setup is the speaker system – they are still the Logitech Z-5500. Why? Because they are still the best sounding computer speakers money can buy.