1. Is The World Ready For DIY HDMI PCs? Are We?

The impetus for this story was to explore the workability of building one's own HDMI-and hi-definition DVD player equipped PC. While we were ultimately successful in our quest for this goal - and wow, is this landscape changing daily as new HDMI-equipped graphics cards and motherboards hit the marketplace - we learned numerous interesting things along the way as we groped toward both Intel and AMD implementations for a mid- to high-end media-capable system.

In this story, we'll provide benchmarks for both AMD- and Intel-based solutions and report on our experiences in pulling benchmarks together. We'll also discuss some powerful and potentially disturbing trade-offs would-be system builders must face, and some newly announced products (which alas, we were unable to obtain and review in time for this story) that may come to the rescue when putting your own DIY HDMI- and high-definition DVD media system together.

Components For The Ideal Media PC

Having built several-dozen media PCs already in the course of writing two books and many articles on this technology (one on MythTV on the Linux side, the other on Windows Media Center 2005), we've developed a good set of criteria for building quality media-ready PCs. But we quickly learned that some newly-available HDMI technology conflicts with those principles, as does a desire to equip a system with both HD-DVD and Blu-ray players (or perhaps, unhealthy curiosity about the feasibility thereof).

Over time, we've observed that adhering to certain design goals delivers better media PC results (at least, during the "pre-HDMI era" - but we have plenty to say on that topic throughout this story):

The Silverstone Technology LaScala 14 is so black that it is very difficult to photograph it. See the next image for some detail.

Compact, horizontal cases work best for use in an entertainment center. We've worked with units as small as the PC Alchemy MiniMCE M1B PC, which measures a petite 6.5" x 2" x 6.5" (16.5 x 5.1 x 16.5 cm), and is built around an AOpen ultra-compact OEM-only barebones enclosure. But we tend to prefer cases like the Antec Fusion or Overture II, the SilverStone Technology LaScala LC14, and so forth, because their larger dimensions can accommodate at least a Micro ATX motherboard and most can even handle a full-blown ATX mobo.