Home Theatre PC Buyer's Guide - Q1 2009

Optical Drive

First Choice: LG GGGC H2OL Blu-ray, HD DVD DVD-RW combo drive
UK Pricing: £64.18 (Inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $139.99 (ex. Tax)

If you're talking about building an HD capable HTPC in 2009, you've absolutely got to consider the Blu-ray option, or better yet, both BD and HD DVD! This LG combo drive is pretty cheap and with very cheap deals on HD DVDs still to be found it's a great option for getting into HD movies. The drive can also write to DVD and DVD-RW too for backups if needed as well - the only thing it doesn't do is write Blu-ray discs.

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing: £71.59 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $99.99 (ex. Tax)

While 1.5/2TB drives command that price premium, getting 1TB of hard drive space for less than £75 is really great value! The performance of the drive is one of the best there is too, thanks to the huge data density on the three 334GB platters inside.

What's more, keeping to a single large disk rather than multiples affords better energy efficiency and less noise - all whilst running very quietly. With tonnes of space for potential media storage it also opens up the potential for hours of TV recording and a NAS box for the family (although we would advise additional backups elsewhere).

CPU Cooler

First Choice: Zalman CNPS8000
UK Pricing: £30.50
US Pricing: $33.99

First of all: ARGH! You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a cooler under 12cm tall these days! The Cooler Master Z600 CPU would have been perfect but it's too tall.

Notcua, Thermalright, OCZ and all other "on-end" heatpipe coolers are too tall. For the Antec Fusion to work optimally the two 120mm side exhaust fans sat incredibly close to the CPU heatsink, it needs one of these coolers.

Unfortunately we are limited to something a little shorter so we looked at a Zalman CNPS9500. Perfect, we thought - it's a high quality Zalman classic and it's designed to be quiet.

However, it seems Zalman includes an LED in just about everything these days making it useless for an HTPC. We ended up with the CNPS8000 by default, which is certainly not a bad choice, but we're paying £5 to buy a product without LEDs.

Power Supply

First Choice: OCZ 400W ModXStream Pro PSU
UK Pricing: £44.99 (Inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $47.99 (ex. Tax)

There's no need to spend a huge amount on a high powered PSU - 400W is overkill for even this system. However, we do like to leave a bit of overhead for future upgrades and we chose the new ModXStream because of its high rated efficiency (review due soon to check this) and because it's modular, which means cable mess is kept to a minimum. All our other personal favourites like the Corsair VX, the latest CX series and Seasonic S12II for example are all non-modular. In a small case like the Antec Fusion, this can be a problem.