A couple months ago, Mike and I decided that for our joint birthdays (which are a month apart), we would build a media PC ground up to showcase all our movies, music and photos on the TV. Neither of us had built one before, although both of us have replaced parts. One thing was clear – research wise, this was going to be no minor undertaking.

Many options and choices presented themselves along the way. Mac or PC was the first one. AppleTV looked like the easiest choice to get started right away with no building, but the AppleTV lacked media file type options (i.e. can’t play my divx files) and locks you into their program. We wanted control over what kinds of files we could play, so AppleTV was not for us. (Although the interface looked great.)

The next choice came at us from a short Wired article that recommended using Xbox or PS3 as a media streamer from a network storage device (NAS), connected with gigabit ethernet. This sounded like a great choice, except for the lack of an Xbox or PS3 J Not being a gamer myself I didn’t mind going this route but it seemed to fall into similar file type restrictions that we discussed with AppleTV. The game centers might not be able to handle all our file types. I again didn’t like the idea of being restricted, but I did like the idea of keeping all the media on a separate network device. We could set that up in a raid array so we could feel more secure about having backups, and we could share that device with all the machines that come and go from our network (laptops, etc). Plus, some NAS devices support different client OS’, so we could have a Mac, PC and Linux machine all on our media network. Choices, me like.

In the end, we came back to square one – build a media PC from scratch – but decided to add in a NAS for storage. So, next step was to figure out how to build a machine. My brother, a network engineer, pointed me to a few sites which had great information. Tom’s Hardware had any number of do-it-yourself how to guides. There was one article I used to outline what pieces we would need. Then, I used NewEgg to search on the hardware pieces, and used their nice consolidated specs, photos, and community ratings to add to the hardware choices. Once I had a list of components that I wanted, I posted them to Tom’s Hardware “New Build” forum, where the community of users at Tom’s gave me all sorts of recommendations.

One of the best recommendations was that there was a new chipset that supported native HDMI output from the motherboard without use of a video card!!! This was great, as the video cards were pretty expensive. We wanted HDMI output instead of DVI because HDMI puts audio and video in one cable. One pitfall with HDMI output that I learned along the way is that just because it says HDMI doesn’t mean it supports audio in the same cable! The Gigabyte AMD 780G motherboard is what we ended up getting with recommendations. I’ve never had a machine with an AMD processor, but this motherboard was perfect for our needs. The Gigabyte documentation was awesome, too, making it very easy to figure out how to put this machine together. One tip – if I am on the market for motherboards again, I’ll read the full documentation before I buy.

After making our choices on power supply, memory, HDD, and a nice looking case, we found a BlueRay/DVD/CD player/burner drive on NewEgg also. When this drive came out 6 months ago it was $500, but on NewEgg it was $175, so we went for it. We’re looking at TV tuner cards right now, and will add that later on along with a NAS and universal remote.

“Build day” was pretty stressful, as we ran into some snags. After I put all the hardware pieces together the machine wouldn’t boot. After talking for a good bit over potential causes, Mike suggested that we reset the CMOS by removing the small battery in the motherboard. That got the machine to boot! However, each subsequent time we tried to boot we faced the same issue unless we reset the CMOS. With some guidance from my brother and from Tom’s Hardware forums, we narrowed it down to the memory. The BIOS needed to be configured to increase the voltage for the memory, even though the cards called for 1.9 volts. This is because we were using 2 memory cards, and needed to up the voltage to 2.1 (this isn’t mentioned in documentation but the experts concurred that this was likely the issue). Once that was done, boot-up happened with no problem!

To my amazement, someone monitoring the forums in Tom’s was so helpful, he wouldn’t even go to bed until we were successfully booted up! How nice is that for a total stranger? I felt much better having a group of experts to look over the specs and the installation so carefully. They were super responsive (and fast!) in the forum. And dedicated!

So now, we have Windows Vista Home edition, and we’re using one HDMI cable to connect to the TV! We have the desktop monitor set as the primary display and the TV the “extended” display. Whenever we want to watch a movie or show photos, we just slide the window we want over to the TV display. Each display is set for their best resolution. It all seems too easy!

The BlueRay drive was a nice choice. Watching our first BlueRay movie (Pixar’s Cars) was amazing, like being at the movies. I’m looking forward to backing up all my DVDs and BlueRays to the NAS (once we get it) and using Windows Media Center to manage them, as I hear the interface is very nice. Also, Vista hasn’t been as much as a problem as I thought. We were able to get the drivers we needed for all our hardware, and given that the motherboard we chose is a newer model it came with Vista drivers. It boots up a little slower than my old XP machine (which was a slow machine to begin with, being 8 years old!). Otherwise, no complaints on it yet. Of course, it’s only day 4.