2. Each Component Considered, Continued

We picked a quiet, 80-plus power supply from Zalman, the 460W ZM460-APS Silent Power Supply. Its rated output delivers more power than we really need for this system, but it's incredibly efficient and not at all noisy.

We chose a recently-released Gigabyte motherboard, the MA69G-S3H, which like the Asus M2A-VM HDMI board we profiled in Part 1 of this series, also packages up video and audio output quite nicely for outbound delivery (it does so through a built-in HDMI output on the port block, rather than with a daughter card, though). We forgo the built-in graphics here for a high-end 8800 card, however.

The Gigabyte MA69G family is built around the AM2 socket and the AMD 690G chipset. We chose the powerful, top-of-the-line AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0 GHz AM2 processor for this build, because it offered the best overall performance in our recent DIY article. We stayed with the stock cooler for this CPU, because it was the only one with an AM2 bracket we had around.