Hi guys, this will be my first project log, and it will be for an HTPC. I am going to tell you that there will be some modding involved. It will not be my first mod... well it will be my first big mod. Anyways, the case is going to be made of wood... Yes I did say wood. I have 4 sheets of cabinet grade plywood laying around, so I figured why not use it? Let me give you some background info on my wanting to do this. I started this idea of an HTPC when I would set up movie night for my family on my moms laptop connected to a 20" monitor. If I am not watching the movie with my parents, I really would just like to not bother, but if I built this, they could do it on their own and have no problem with it. I started getting really annoyed a few months ago when I would be doing it every night (neither of my parents are computer literate, plus I'm only 17 so they expect me to do it for them.) I started to try and get my moms old Intel Celeron desktop working again, but that was to no avail (kinda glad too). I purchased a new graphics card (without too much research which is not like me at all) and realized it was worse than my current card for gaming. The graphics card I purchased was a SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6670 1GB DDR3. I didn't realize the DDR3 part, and thought it would perform slightly better than my HIS Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 card, but no dice. So I decided that I would use it for my parents HTPC. On to the build part now. I have always been a Intel based PC user, and fanboy truthfully, but seeing as the new card is compatible with AMD's FM1 Llano APU chipset, I am going to be basing it around that. The processor is not something I have completely set my heart on yet, but it will be one of four processors: the A6-3500, the A6-3650, the A6-3670K, or the A8-3850. The motherboard will be one of three A55 Micro ATX boards: the Gigabyte GA-A55M-DS2, the ASRock A55M-HVS, or the MSI A55M-P33. I have a XION 700W power supply lying around, but it is faulty, that I would probably wouldn't use, but here are my choices: the Antec BP550 Plus, the Corsair CX430 V2, the Corsair CX500 V2, the Corsair CX600 V2, or the Rosewill HIVE-650. I have 7 old and small data size SATA first generation hard drives that I could use, but I would truly prefer not to for an extended period of time, so I would either go with a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB, a WD Caviar Blue 1TB, or a Seagate Barracuda 3TB (all SATA 6Gb/s) I am not sure if I would get an SSD seeing as the price of them is still pretty high for data size, but if I did, it would be a 60/64, 90, or 120/128GB drive, such as the Crucial M4, a SAMSUNG 830, a Intel 520, or a Corsair Force GT. A CD/DVD drive wouldn't be necessary, seeing as I get all my movies online, and I will probably just install windows with a flash drive. The heatsink is something I really want to put a water block on (just for fun), but I would settle for the Cooler Master GeminII S524. As for RAM, I have 2x2GB of ADATA DDR3 1333MHz lying around from my friends old PC, which is really all an HTPC needs for my parents. As I said above the graphics card is already in hand and I am building the case from wood.
