2. The Components, Continued

We picked a quiet, green power supply from CoolerMaster, the RS-430-ASAA. It’s rated at 430 watts (more than we really need for this system, but incredibly efficient and not terribly expensive either).

We chose the HDMI version of a recently-released Asus motherboard, the M2A-VM HDMI, which packages up video and audio output quite nicely for outbound delivery through an add-on HDMI port. Please note that using the motherboard’s HDMI output requires inserting a daughter card into the PCIe x16 slot, so Asus clearly and reasonably assumes that if you want to use the mobo’s HDMI output you also plan to use its onboard graphics (otherwise, you’d take HDMI out through the graphics card).

The M2A-VM family is built around the AM2 socket and the AMD 690G chipset. We chose a mid-range but still pretty powerful AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 2.4 GHz processor for this build, because it’s very affordable.

Windows Media Center can limp by on 512 MB of RAM, but we think 1 GB is the effective minimum for any system with which you will watch or record HDTV. To keep costs down, we chose modestly priced but very capable Corsair Value Select PC2-5300 (533 MHz) memory. We used two 512 MB memory modules, for total memory of 1 GB.

We chose a Samsung Spinpoint SP2004C 200 GB SATA II drive for this build. This drive is especially cheap (bigger drives in this family are available, but cost more), and Spinpoint drives are well-known for their quiet and dependable operation. SATA cables are narrow, and don’t block air circulation inside the case, either.