OPTICAL DRIVE
There hasn’t been a whole lot of action in the optical drive arena
over the last year—everyone has just been waiting on the next-
generation formats. Now that Blu-ray and HD-DVD have fi nally
arrived, folks who are assembling an HTPC have to make a choice:
Do you want to go with DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, or all of the above?
If you’ve got a money hat, it can’t hurt to cover all the bases, but
most people will want to stick with DVD for now; the next-gen opti-
cal formats simply aren’t ready for prime time.
Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives are ludicrously expensive, if
you can even fi nd them—the fi rst Blu-ray drive to arrive in the Lab
costs a whopping $1,000 (see the review on page 82). Second,
the DRM requirements are daunting and stupid (unencrypted digi-
tal signals won’t work, but unencrypted analog signals work fi ne).
The whole category is half-baked.
So that leaves us with DVD, and our favorite DVD writer is the
workhorse Plextor
PX716-A. We love this
drive because we can
get it to run silently by
slowing it down with
the included Plextools
software. It also comes
with a black bezel—a
crucial feature for a
slick-looking HTPC.
Sure, there are newer
models available, but
frankly, their miniscule
speed increases aren’t
worth the extra cash.Plextor’s PX716-A is still our
favorite optical drive, despite the
recent arrival of next-gen HD opti-
cal formats.MOTHERBOARD AND CPU
The CPU for a home-theater PC must do
two things well: encode video and run
silently. That’s where AMD’s new Energy
Effi cient Small Formfactor Athlon 64 X
3800+ comes into play. This new dual-
core AM2 CPU delivers enough power
to transcode video and watch TV at the
same time, without your system being
dragged to the fl oor like it would with a
single-core CPU. The 2GHz, 512KB L
chip has more than enough power.
To make the selection even easier,
the EE SFF 3800+ is currently AMD’s only
dual-core with a “D” rating. A D means
that even among its energy effi cient breth-
ren, the X2 3800+ is one cool cucumber.
How cool? The Athlon 64 FX-62 is a 125
watt chip, the “Energy Effi cient” X2 4600 is
65 watts. The SFF version of the X2 3800+
is a 35 -watt jobbie. As Keanu would say,
Whoa. We’re not even sure we need a heatsink to cool this baby.
To go with our cool and quiet CPU, we picked up a kick-ass
Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard (reviewed September 2005).
The M2N32-SLI includes built-in 802.11g capability and a pas-
sive cooling design for the north bridge. It’s SLI-ready for future
expandability, so you can just drop in that second 7600 GT for
more gaming power. The M2N32-SLI’s heat pipes let you avoid
the shrilling fans most mobos use to keep the chipset running
cool, instead piping the heat into a heatsink near the CPU cool-
er, so it can handle the hard work.The thermal
equivalent of
Uncle McScrooge,
the Athlon 64 X
3800+ and the
heat-pipe M2N32-
SLI make for a
quiet yet powerful
package.IR BLASTER
An infrared blaster is a crucial component in our home-theater PC con-
fi guration. These devices receive commands from your PC and/or your
handheld remote control and pass them on to the appropriate device.
Some IR blasters are designed to work with specifi c universal
remote controls. Universal Remote Controls’ PowerBlaster for example,
is an add-on product for that company’s MasterControl line of univer-
sal remotes. And Logitech bundles an IR blaster with its Harmony 890
remote. Both these devices receive RF signals, convert them to infrared,
and send them to hard-wired IR emitters that you glue in front of the
receiving device’s IR pickup.
Because they receive RF commands, there’s no line-of-sight
requirement for this type of IR blaster, which allows you to hide your
components in a closet. The PowerBlaster hosts as many as six emit-
ters; the Harmony 890 handles up to four.
Our system will also utilize a second type of IR blaster: Jon
Rhees’ clever USB-UIRT. This box will link our HTPC to either a
cable or satellite TV
receiver. It plugs into the
PC’s USB port, receives
commands from both the
TV tuner software run-
ning on the PC and from
IR remotes, and passes
them to the tuner. This
will enable the software
running on the PC to
change the channels
on the set-top box.HARD DRIVE
They say that size doesn’t matter, but it’s of primary impor-
tance when choosing a hard drive for a home theater PC.
Movies, music, and adult entertainment
take up a lot of space, so the more
gigabytes you can muster, the better.
And because the slim design of most
HTPC cases limits you to just one or
two drives, you’ll want to maximize
your storage capacity. Install one or two
super-huge drives and you’ll never have
to crack open the case again (or at least
not for a long, long time).
It’s also important to consider the
amount of noise and heat your drives
will generate. Lucky for you, we haven’t
heard a “loud” drive in quite some time.
All of the high-end 7,200rpm drives have
moved to fl uid bearings for the spindle
motor, and are thus very quiet. Heat out-
put, however, varies on a drive-by-drive
basis. Western Digital drives typically
run on the cool side, with Hitachi and
Seagate a smidge hotter.
For our ultimate living room rig, we
chose the 750GB Seagate Barracuda
7200.10 because it’s freaking huge. It’s so big that we
could rip 180 DVDs to it, with room to spare for our music
collection. That’s a big honkin’ drive.An IR blaster enables a home-theater PC
to control a cable or satellite set-top box.Bigger is better
when it comes to
a home theater
hard drive, and
it doesn’t get
any bigger than
Seagate’s massive
750GB Barracuda.OCTOBER 2006 MAXIMUMPC 29
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