My guide to a home theater PC reveals what components you should buy and how you should set them up

I updated this post, please look below for my additional comments.

At its core, the home-theater dream can be distilled as follows: We want our movies to feel as cinematic as possible. And we want to be able to record and watch as many shows as possible on the biggest-possible TV screen. Well I am here to show you everything you will need to accomplish this task. I am going to break down the parts list to my build.

The Ceton InfiniTV 4 quad-tuner card

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EVGA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Video Card

 

 

 

 

 

Intel BOXDP67DEB3 LGA 1155 Motherboard

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intel Core i5-2400 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz

 

 

 

 

 

 

LG Blu-Ray Burner

 

 

 

 

 

CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W Power Supply

 

 

 

 

 

 

HITACHI Deskstar 0S03230 3TB 5400 RPM Hard Drive

 

 

 

 

 

 

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 Memory

 

 

 

 

 

 

OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive

 

 

 

 

 

 

SILVERSTONE Black Aluminum / Steel LC13B-E ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the parts list and I have completed the build, after careful consideration on what operating system to use, since Windows 7 is the only way to use the Ceton cable card tuner, I went with Windows 7 Professional 64bit oem. Remember that when you buy your computer parts and you exceed the 4 gig memory limit you will want to drop that 32bit O/S and jump up to the 64bit version.

Check Back Soon!!

I am going to post screen shots of my current build along with performance and software recommendations for the system.

UPDATE

After several months of using my new system I found the build to be very stable, some of the tweaks I have done have made the experience an overall great success on how the system performs.

Recommended Software

I have a list of software I always use with any Media Center build

1. Anydvd HD from Slysoft- I use this to rip my DVD and Blu-Ray collection to disk, this gives me the ability to view my entire collection with just a few remote clicks
2. My Movies- This software organize all my DVD Blu-Ray collection within the Media Center interface.
3. Total Media Theatre 5- This software is used to play you Blu-Ray rips within Media Center, this software does alot more than this but this is the function I use it for since Media Center natively plays pretty much everything else with out other codecs.

Hard Drive Performance and System Performance

The system itself has performed quite well as you can see from my benchmark results, I do like the Windows Experience because it gives you a basic rating system  that you can monitor from time to time to see if any hardware is not working correctly. The hard drive test I use the ATTO benchmark tool that be downloaded for free at ATTO LINK