- Building a Home Theater PC

The folks at Voided Warranty have written up a guide which explains how to go about building up your own dedicated home theater PC, mainly with regard to a streamlined software side of things. There's been a few similar guides posted from various sources recently but after having a read of this one it's as good as any of them, if not better. Some useful tips / ideas have since made their way to my loungeroom setup here.

One of our forum members made a post about the TIVO/DVD Copier that he had made.This sparked some interest in me and I decided to build a Home Theater PC (HTPC) for myself. Initially I was going to keep the project on the cheap side and use most of the parts I have on hand. But after installing the programs and testing I wasn't happy with the picture quality and dropped frames. The video card was an old Matrox Marvel G450 eTV w32MB of RAM and the video capture card was a Leadtek Winfast TV 2000 XP. The Winfast TV 2000 XP uses software encoders/decoders. Ideally the video capture board should have hardware decoders. So it is off to the store. Total cost of my HTPC was around $983 (US).

- Dual Opteron workstation motherboards compared

For all you SMP enthusiasts out there, the TechReport have rounded up a few dual Opteron motherboards for comparison. Namely, they check out MSI's K8T Master2, Tyan's Tiger K8W and also their fully featured Thunder K8W which definitely leaves the others with a little to be desired.

Despite all the hype over AMD64, only a handful of mobo manufacturers has jumped into the dual Opteron workstation game since the chip's launch. Don't let the limited number of boards fool you, though. We've rounded up a trio of dual Opteron boards, and there's quite a bit of variety to be had. Read on to find out which board best suits your workstation needs or enthusiast desires.

- Articles and Reviews from around the Web

- Albatron PX875P Pro Canterwood Motherboard @ TweakNews
- Logitech MX510 Mouse @ OCIA
- 80GB Snap Appliance Snap Server 1100 @ BigBruin
- Win XP Tweaking guide updated @ IAmNotAGeek
- Samsung SyncMaster 173P @ DesignTechnica
- Startech "Mutant Mods" Lighting Products @ ModSynergy
- Enermax EG475AX-VE(W) Noisetaker power supply @ ExtremeOverclocking
- The smallest home made PC @ PC Unleash
- EverCool CUW8-715 heatsink @ A1-Electronics
- HIS Excalibur 9600XT Turbo VIVO @ TheTechZone