Building a Media PC

For about as long as I can remember, or at the very least, since a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to build a Media Centre PC. It’s not the easiest thing to research – there’s a few places where you can buy something “out of the box”, but I couldn’t find any that would put a machine together out of the pieces I wanted. So, I finally bit the bullet, bought all the bits, and put it together myself!

I’ve never actually put a computer together from scratch before, so I was a little intimidated. The thing I was most worried about was the CPU, as there’s so many things that can go wrong with it. For example, if you don’t have enough thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsync, and it can overheat, burn out, and potentially damage the motherboard as well. Ironically, if you have too much thermal paste, the same thing can happen!

There were a few other gotchas as well, like just trying to get everything to fit. It’s a fairly large case, but due to the way it’s “zoned” (which helps with cooling), there’s not a lot of space for all the cables to fit in. Plus, I made a few n00b mistakes, such as not attaching both power connectors to the motherboard, and then wondering why nothing happened when I powered on.

But after a few false starts, I finally had everything up and running! Here’s the final product – as you can see, the machine fits perfectly into our existing TV cabinet:

The only thing that I couldn’t get working properly was the sound. I was relying on the sound from the motherboard, but as it turns out there’s no optical output. So after a number of frustrating hours trying to get that working, I’ve given up and ordered a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio card instead. Awesome!

Update: The new audio card has arrived, and has been installed. Just wish I got this one in the first place, it would have saved a lot of headaches!