TV playback, audio

Hard drive

Western Digital Caviar SE 320GB – Newegg $118.99: Western Digital’s Caviar SE 320GB serves as the hard drive in our HTPC. The reason? Bang for the buck. At about 37 cents per gigabyte, the 320GB Caviar SE model we used sells for under $120 right now. It may not be the speediest drive out there, featuring a 7200RPM spindle speed and 8MB cache, but it makes very little noise and runs cool, two very important characteristics for an HTPC. The Caviar SE also features a 3-year warranty as well.

Optical Storage

N/A: Budget $50 for a good upgrade: When it comes to optical storage, we don’t have any particular preference, you can find lots of solid DVD burners for under $50, so that’s what we’ve budgeted for this component.

TV tuner

ATI HDTV Wonder - $108.99 Newegg: For TV playback, we chose ATI’s venerable HDTV Wonder PCI HDTV tuner card. The HDTV Wonder is one of the older HDTV tuner cards on the market (first launched by ATI in 2003) so it may not have all the bells and whistles of some of the newer HDTV tuner cards out there, but it’s still one of the more versatile HDTV tuner cards on the market. The card supports both high definition and standard definition TV tuning and playback, utilizing a Philips TV tuner for these duties. Image quality is quite good with the HDTV Wonder, particularly when watching high definition content, although when it comes to standard definition it’s a little easier to see that the Theater 200 chip that the HDTV Wonder relies on is a little dated, even ATI’s own Theater 550 Pro ASIC provides better quality overall, although as we noted in our roundup of Theater 550 cards, the difference isn’t quite as dramatic as you’d think. Theater 550 sports a 3D comb filter, for handling scenes with little movement, such as slow moving video, or static items in a scene. The 3D comb filter is then backed up by a 5-line 2D comb filter and is used for fast motion video. In comparison the Theater 200 chip used by the HDTV Wonder only has a 3-line comb filter, and no 3D comb filter.

Finally, the HDTV Wonder even comes with one of ATI’s RF-based Remote Wonder remote control units, making controlling your HTPC from your couch more comfortable.

There are reports among HTPC users concerning compatibility issues with the HDTV Wonder card, but we haven’t run into any of these problems over the years. We’ve run the HDTV Wonder in systems based on chipsets from ATI, Intel, and NVIDIA without any issue. In fact the only problem that’s been reported that we can recreate is a driver error with the Remote Wonder unit, but this can be easily solved via driver update from X10, who makes the Remote Wonder remotes for ATI.

Audio

Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music - $111.99 Newegg: For audio duties we’re going with Creative’s Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music. The Xtreme Music has much of the audio capabilities that X-Fi cards have become known for, without the pricey extras such as Creative’s untested X-RAM and the external module found on Creative’s high-end Elite audio cards. You can find the Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Music cards selling for $112 on Newegg right now in comparison to the X-Fi Elite which goes for over $380.

Alternatives: Obviously you could stick with the onboard audio provided by your motherboard. With many motherboards now shipping with integrated 7.1 HD Azalia audio, this isn’t nearly as bad as the noisy, crackling integrated audio CODECs of a few years ago. We’re also big fans of cards based on VIA’s Envy 24HT chip. These cards deliver crystal clear audio that rivals that of Creative’s latest and greatest at a fraction of the price. This would probably be our top choice actually if primarily use your computer for music listening.