Home Theatre PC Buyer's Guide - Q1 2009

Sound Card

First Choice: Asus Xonar HDAV
UK Pricing: £160.85 (Inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $205.61 (ex. Tax)

This is the absolute king of pimped out, consumer sound cards. The HDAV comes with support for just about everything: HDMI, LPCM HD 7.1 channel RCA out with support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS MasterHD sound, interchangable Op-Amps - the lot. It also features Dolby and DTS software extra's like DTS:NeoPC, and Dolby Digital Pro Logic IIx and Live to upmix stereo sound to full surround as well.

If you're serious about your HD hardware and watching HD movies as they were meant to be enjoyed (with high quality surround audio as well as HD visuals), then this is absolutely the card to get.

CPU Cooler

First Choice: Noctua NH-U12P
UK Pricing: £48.17 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $59.95 (ex. Tax)

We see a lot of very expensive CPU coolers here at bit-tech, and sadly for the most part they're rarely a decent option for cooling your CPU. Frequently built too large, too high or just too damn noisy; in the world of heatsinks at least, bigger is most certainly not always better.

However, the Noctua NH-U12P manages to achieve both excellent cooling with fantastically quiet performance and excellent thermal results too, combining to make one of our favourite heatsinks ever. Despite operating at a very low 19dBA thanks to its special SSO bearing fan, the cooler is still able to keep our notoriously hot test system at a comfortable 23°C above ambient temperatures at load.

While there are coolers which perform better thermally, none do it so quietly, and for the complete package of high-end air cooling and excellent acoustic performance, the Noctua NH-U12P is one of the best options out there.

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! It also means that several for RAID 1 or 5 won't cost the earth either. The performance of the Samsung Spinpoint F1 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).