Home Theatre PC Buyer's Guide - Q1 2009

Alternative Choices

Motherboard

Alternative Choice: Asus M3A79-T
UK Pricing: £136.72 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $184.25 (ex. Tax)

While a bit more expensive that we'd like, the new southbridge which offers advanced overclocking features for the Black Edition Phenom II X4 processors is worth it. In addition, there are more SATA ports and the 790FX is AMD's premium chipset offering a pair of full PCI-Express 2.0 x16 lanes for CrossFire. The M3A79-T is still one of the best AM2+ boards we've tested to date and as such we'll continue to recommend it.

CPU

Alternative Choice: AMD Phenom II X4 940
UK Pricing: £199.98 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $234.99 (ex. Tax)

The Phenom II 940 is still a great CPU from AMD, and while traditionally AMD quad-core processors were considered incredibly hot running, the X4 940 uses less power when Idle than the Q9550 and only a little more at load. The AMD drops behind the Q9550 in most benchmarks, but it's still a very capable CPU and also about £30 cheaper too.

Graphics Card

Alternative Choice: Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 1GB (GV-R485MC-1GH)
UK Pricing: £144.84 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $217.99 (ex. Tax)

Gigabyte's passive Radeon HD 4850 means that graphics card noise is entirely nullified. Combined with the Lian Li Tyr with its large fans directing a huge amount of airflow right onto the motherboard and graphics card, there's no chance of it overheating either. The Radeon HD 4850 features AMD's UVD video accelerator which allows 7.1 channel HD sound over HDMI (with HDCP included) as well, basically fulfilling the complete requirement for Blu-ray movies unlike the previous generations (including the AMD 780G chipset) which are limited to "DVD quality" 5.1 surround.


The only thing stopping us from making this our preferred hardware is the fact it doesn't quite have enough grunt to run full HD that smoothly, unlike the Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 (216). If you aren't into heavy gaming on your media centre or can live with playing at lower resolutions, this is actually the better choice. If you aren't intending to game at all, we recommend looking at the Radeon HD 4550 instead and saving a lot more energy and cash.

That's all from us this quarter! If you have any recommendations or suggestions you'd like to make to future editions of this series, please let us know in the forums. Also, if you have recently built an HTPC system of your own to a cost - we're keen to know how you got on with it!