One of the reasons I’ve been so quiet over the weekend is I’ve been building a Home Theatre PC, which when finished will totally solve my HD video issues.

It’s just about finished (read about my problems below) and it looks very cool in the Antec Fusion case pictured, although I’ve decided I need to buy a Graphics Card rather than rely on the onboard card in my ASUS M2NPV-VM Motherboard.

I wasn’t planning on building a HTPC and in fact I’d been trying to avoid doing so, but on Thursday my Netgear NEXT router died so I went shopping on Friday to buy a replacement. While I was looking around YoYo Tech on Tottenham Court Road, I starting looking at the HTPC cases and I told the sales assistant about the problems I was having getting HD video onto my HD plasma as my PC was in a different room and my Xbox running XBMC didn’t have enough processing power to handle 720p/1080i content.

I asked how much it would cost to put together a HTPC and he put together the following system for under £350 (funnily enough he put together this exact system reviewed by ExtremeTech):

• Antec Fusion Lifestyle Case
• Asus M2NPV-VM Motherboard
• 4600+ X2 Dual Core CPU
• 2GB DDR2 RAM

I cannibalised bits from my current PC (DFI Lanparty SLI-DR Expert, AMD 4200+ X2, 4GB Ram, 2xSamsung 19″, Seasonic PSU, Watercooled CPU & GPU , X1900XT, Soundblaster X-Fi, 1.7TB Storage) for the optical drive, TV card (Hauppauge Nova T-500) and storage (500GB SATAII)

Constructing the PC took longer than I hoped as cramming all the bits into the tiny case was quite hard work, but luckily my new HTPC booted at the second attempt. However, that’s when my problems started.

I decided that given that the HTPC would be my main music source it needed the Soundblaster X-Fi card but I couldn’t get the drivers to work. I managed to get the Hauppauge Nova T-500 card working which was good, but the video playback was very choppy and the colours were very poor. Upgrading the video drivers helped a bit, but the quality was still poor and definitely worse than my Xbox running XBMC.

I went for the Asus M2NPV-VM Motherboard as it has a HDTV out module with component outputs which meant I could I could use the Component inputs on my Panasonic SA-XR55 freed up by removing the Xbox, and because the store assistant told me the Asus was powerful enough to run HD video ( he probably read the ExtremeTech review). Unfortunately it’s not, so I started shopping for a dedicated video card.

I ended up buying a 7950GT graphics card, which is probably more powerful than I need but I’m trying to build the HTPC to last at least 4 years. Computer components change so quickly and technologies seem to become obsolete within 18 months, so I decided I needed to overspec the HTPC now as trying to upgrade it cheaply in the future probably won’t be possible.

Because the 7950GT comes with DVI outputs, I decided I couldn’t hold off buying a HDMI Switch any longer as my receiver only has 1 HDMI input and I knew that constantly having to manually swap 3 HDMI cables (Telewest TV Drive, PS3 and now the HTPC) was going to get annoying. It also meant that I had to splash out on a DVI-HDMI cable, a HDMI-HDMI cable.

All of this extra cost (including buying a cheap Soundblaster X-Fi card to replace the one I took out of my main PC, and a digital coaxial cable on eBay) meant that my HTPC hasn’t turned out to be the bargain I thought I had on Friday. When it is all finished though, I will hopefully have a stonking home network and entertainment setup that will keep me going for a few years until I decide to do something silly like buy a 1080p HDTV or decide I want to hook up the other rooms in my pad. That won’t be happening soon though as I should be buying a new pad later on this year, which will eat up every penny I have.

What PC/AV projects are you planning for this year?