think the extra investment is well worth it — especially when you consider the cost of a quad-output card like NVIDIA’s Quadro NVS 440 needed to enable similar functionality. Storage: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500630AS 500 GB HDD Again, we’re using...

• -Networking in Small Spaces

external connection for your PC when one is lacking. The price for this gem is around $60. We can’t think of too many Dads or grads who wouldn’t be glad to put any SATA drive to work inside it, especially bigger ones (500 GB+) that tend to run hot. For...

and appetite for memory. Our HDD choice is Hitachi's Deskstar HDS725050KLA360 500 GB, 7,200 RPM, 16 MB Cache, SATA/300 We like using SATA drives, both magnetic and optical, in media PCs because SATA cables are more compact, easier to route and thus less likely...

• -The Intel Fork: Motherboard And CPUs

GB, while the T series goes up to 500 GB; those who wish to buy bigger (and spend more) would do well to check out the 400 GB and 500 GB models in this series, or the Western Digital WD Caviar SE 16 500 GB drives. The Spinpoint drives (and the WD drive also...

T9300 (2.5 GHz) processor, 4 GB of DDR2-667 RAM, a single 5400 RPM 320 GB SATA hard disk, and both wired 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11a/g/n wireless network connections. The Blu-ray burner is a nice touch, with 25 GB of capacity on a single-layer media blank (it...

are willing to spend.. I had a couple of leftover 160 GB Western Digital Caviar IDE hard drives (WD1600JB) lying around that I threw into the HTPC on a temporary basis while I waited for a couple of 250 GB SATA drives to arrive. This was a mistake. I found...

TV tuners, you will have an even greater need for hard drive performance. Processor AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Motherboard MSI Platinum K8N Neo 4 Memory 2X 512 Corsair PC3200 (1024 MB) HDD 2X 250 GB SATA RAID 0 Array Graphics Card Geforce 7900 GTX HD Tuner...