Planning
Probably the most important place to devote plenty of time to is the planning stage. You see so many unfinished HTPC projects for sale on ebay because of poor planning.
Where do you want the HTPC to live?
Does it have to blend in with existing equipment?
What space is available?
Is there sufficient fresh air/cooling and is a very quiet HTPC required?
What connections are available for the display and sound?
What tasks do you want the HTPC to perform, does it include intensive tasks like DivX encoding or playing new graphically intensive games
Are you OK having an IR receiver for your HTPC control outside of the unit and therefore in sight?
Are you planning on watching Freeview TV and can you get a good enough Freeview signal?
What operating system and/or PVR software are you planning on using - if it's Windows Media Centre is your hardware compatible?
What's the budget (and don't forget to include the cost of software)?
Technology considerations
At this time the best type of connections to consider building into your HTPC should be a DVI display connection and a digital out sound port (either optical or coaxial).
To be able to play High Definition DVD's a 3Ghz CPU (or equivalent) is suggested by Microsoft.
If you decide to use onboard graphics it may be best to consider 1GB of RAM.
A Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) is a nice thing to have but how visible will it be from your viewing position? It's also likely to add around 50 to the cost.
TV capture can come in many formats. The most common are Freeview (DVB-T) cards or analogue TV capture cards (to capture terrestrial TV or Sky/Cable TV via s-video and audio inputs). To run under Windows Media Centre 2005 (MCE) you need to ensure the TV card has BDA drivers available.
Dual Freeview TV cards means you can watch one Freeview channel whilst recording another or record 2 different channels at the same time. You can also pause, rewind and fast forward TV.
Using a smaller case that only accepts smaller motherboards limits your choices. If you also want a firewire port connected your choice is even less.
Several smaller cases achieve their small frame by the use of either half height add-on cards or riser cards. Half height cards are often not what they appear to be. Although the circuit board of the card may be half height size the bracket to fit to the case is often still full size. It therefore either requires some inventive adaptation or a revisit to the master plan! Riser cards generally enable the rotation and fitting of a PC add-on card through 90 degrees. This may alter what cards you wish to include in your project. Some units, like the Silverstone LC11, only accept motherboards laid out in a specific way. You'll also find riser cards can limit themselves to a particular technology ie only an AGP riser card may be available, not PCI-e.
Xbox 360You really should consider if an Xbox 360 in extender mode hooked up to a 'normal' PC tucked away somewhere else is a suitable alternative. The advantages are that you don't have to consider making an attractive, small, expensive, silent HTPC to sit under your TV if an Xbox 360 is ok. It receives everything it needs from a PC via a network cable (a preference to wireless although this may work too). You therefore don't have to worry about DVI connections, digital sound sockets etc. the 'Premium' Xbox 360 provides a digital optical sound signal as well as Component (HD) output - DVI and other alternatives are likely to be available before too long. The disadvantages are that DivX playback can be a little bit of a challenge to achieve and to achieve full media centre capability you need a MCE 2005 PC for the Xbox 360 to be hooked into.
If you decided to go the MCE route adding the software and remote control set adds approx 110 to the cost. The OEM Nvidia PureVideo decoder should also be considered a vital add-on for this spec and costs between 8 and 35 depending on the version required.
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