BasicDog

This is the story of how I have managed to build a HD Home Theatre PC (HTPC) for only £135 and in the process managed to make a HTPC that uses an average of around 45w of electricity. Perfect for my living room, my electricity bill and in turn; the planet.

I embarked on my venture to build a media PC for two reasons, the first being to free my gaming system from the living room so I can get some much needed gaming action, and the second was an exercise to see how little money I could use to build a High Def capable PC with a HDMI connection. The components that I used are listed in a moment with their costs; these are mostly bought from ebuyer.com or a market stall in Derby.

When building a HTPC you will need the lowest spec and cheapest components that will meet your ends, this will ensure that the PC is both cool and more importantly quieter as the components will produce less heat and fans can be slowed or replaced by passive cooling. An example of ensuring that it will meet your minimum requirements is that I had to ensure that the new PC could run Blu-Ray/HD DVDs for future compatibility with a new HD DVD drive, this requires a 2.4Ghz CPU and a graphics controller strong enough for the decoding, and after researching online I have ensured that I have met them.

Components used and cost
CPU - AMD AM2 Athlon 64 LE1620 - 2.4Ghz (£17)
Motherboard - ASUS M2A-VM HDMI Out*
Graphics - Integrated ATi x1250 256mb*
PSU - Generic 250Watt PSU*
RAM - 512mb DDR2 533 (£8)
Optical Drive - Generic IDE DVD-RW Drive (£20)
Hard Drive - Generic 5400rpm 20GB IDE (£20)

*These components were all included in the £70 bundle from ASUS.

So as I am sure you can see the overall cost of the system is £135 (not including software) this would have been £185 had I put a Blu-Ray/HD DVD player in it.

Performance as a Media PC
As you can imagine, anything beyond basic office applications, browsing the web and watching DVDs will cause slow operation, however the end purpose of the PC was to play media on my 32" HDTV and handle web browsing which I am happy to report it will perform flawlessly.

The use of the HDMI connection instead of a basic VGA connector eliminates the stuttering and tearing of fast moving video playback so that you get a crisp and smooth experience worthy of the TV.

Due to the low spec components and integrated graphics the noise produced be the PC is very low and only noticeable if you are in a silent room, this was essential for the success of the HTPC as there is nothing worse than a humming sound on quiet parts of a film.

As I have a lot of video files stored on all of my PCs it is very important to be able to play the movies from the hard drives that they are stored on, reducing duplicating and therefore needing new hard drives, the 1000mbps ethernet connection on the ASUS M2A-VM is very useful for this.

Power consumption
Idle - 41-42W
DVD Playback - 52w
Load - 70w

As you can see the wattage differs dependant on what you are doing with your PC, this is due to either the hard drive or DVD drive motors running faster or more tasks being handled by the CPU or graphics components.

So what is good power consumption?
These numbers are made all the more impressive when compared to my gaming PC (athlon 64 X2 4600 with ATi 3850pro 512mb) which consumes 60-70watts idle and 155watts under load.

After researching some "Green PC" websites I have found that the average price for building a PC that runs 46watts at idle is around £250-300 and for one capable of running Blu-Ray/HD DVDs will set you back £500-600. This amazed me as I have not gone out of my way to use energy efficient components and have still managed to achieve 41-42watts.

Conclusion
As you can imagine I am chuffed with the outcome of my cheap HTPC, not only achieving all of the features needed for a very low amount cost but also making a low wattage PC in the process, helping with my electricity bills.