1. Introduction

Part 1 of this series examined ten HTPC cases and concluded with our pick of the nMediaPC HTPC 200 for one of the two systems we'll be putting together. This time we'll be plowing through a plethora of motherboards, CPUs, memory modules and power supplies.

The motherboard is one of the most important components in any PC, not just for our HTPC. That's because it's the hub to which all other system components attach, including graphics cards, RAM modules and the CPU. When choosing a mobo for your system, it's worth taking your time to make a decision because the consequences of your choice will be enormous.

For our HTPC, we limited our choices to a small group of MicroATX motherboards. Because we stuck to these small form-factor boards, we had no problem installing any of them in the HTPC cases we chose. The only significant differences among these boards relate to the CPU socket and its associated motherboard chipset.

MicroATX vendors have already integrated lots of functionality right onto the motherboard - just like their larger counterparts. Along with sound, most of these boards include integrated graphics and support for lots of USB 2.0 ports as well as Firewire in their designs. But only a very few also include TV or HDTV outputs.

Since onboard graphics don't always meet HTPC needs, we didn't give that too much weight in our motherboard selection. We already had our eyes on compatible AGP and PCI-Express graphics cards for these systems.

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