So I was talking to a friend about my PC that I will be building next month and we got onto the subject of HTPC vs PS3 (I have the original 60gb with the backward compatibility). Now the main reason I would like a HTPC in the living room is for wireless internet and blu-ray... which the PS3 can do... so I was hoping someone could sell me on the features of a HTPC over my noisy old PS3? One thing i've heard that I can do is watch internet TV, channels are extremely limited and heavily censored in the UAE so it'd be nice to watch some UK TV. If you can convince me that it's worth while then I need a few suggestions on a good HTPC setup, I won't be playing games on it but I want it to be a room feature hence the water cooling aspect. P.S I do listen to allot of music so an awesome sound card would nice. Budget = whatever you think is reasonable to achieve my goals.
lol yes but I've been a bit lazy.. the reason being because the possibilities with a htpc are endless.. have you heard of XBMC? have a look on youtube for openelec xbmc. really power full htpc application where you can add "repo's" basically link to streams like iplayer, 4OD, movies on demand etc... benifits on a ps3 is its easy to use, and there are come cracking exclusive titles like god of war, metal gear solid etc... openelec xbmc has a massive community have a poke around google you'll see what i mean
oh in regards to a case... it depends what hardware you want.. ig you want to put a full size gpu in there look ate the sg05 or sg06 case by silverstone.. 2ndly if you want a full size psu look at the coolermaster 120 elite. in you dont plan on putting a gpu card in and just running off the apu or motherboard have a look at the antec isk range (you wont need water-cooling with this) or do you mean you want a ready made system? if so look at the acer revo or Ion nettops...
http://quietpc.co.uk/products/htpccases/hd50x I like it ! dunx P.S. Less fussy than my Thermaltake BACH but just as capacious. I use a H70 in mine.
I would not watercool a HTPC. It would be running most of the time (and when timer-recording, when you are away or asleep) so you want as little potential as possible for things to go wrong, and you want it to use as little power as possible. A low wattage HTPC does not need a lot of cooling. Passive cooling is the way to go. Some cases are designed to work as heat sinks. There are motherboards that take Intel Mobile CPUs with a TDP of no more than 30W and an integrated GPU with hardware MPEG decoding which is all you need.
I have to agree with Nexxo, there really is no reason to go with anything other than integrated everything with a HTPC. Well, maybe if you already had the parts I guess. I use a prebuilt (shocked face!) Acer Aspire Revo with an Atom D525 and Ion2. Works bloody brilliantly with XBMC with loads of added goodies.
Check out my thread here. Maybe that will help you decide http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=235946
