Well, I had already bought new hardware for my Media Centre PC  a couple of months ago, but this week my good old Silverstone HTPC box died (or the PSU did). I looked a bit around and landed on the Chieftec HM-03B box and a 400W PSU. The box is just fantastic. Has plenty of room, though it only takes a micro-ATX mainboard and low profile expansion cards. The HM-02 box is taller and probably takes the full size expansion cards, though I didn’t really care as I don’t need any additional cards. Anyway, the box comes with a display, a volume and selector knob and a remote. All connected through a single USB cable which fits onto one of the USB connectors on the mainboard.

In addition to the box, I run this setup of an ASUS M4A785D-M PRO mainboard, with a AMD Athlon II X2 240 CPU. Now I’m a long time fan of both AMD and Asus, and generally only buy their hardware. In any case, the Asus mainboard has a ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphic chip and a 7.1 HD audiochip built-in. The GFX card uses shared memory, which is not a problem as I run 2GB of Crucial DDR2 PC5300 RAM. The mainboard has VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors, so I bought a HDMI cable as my now ageing 32″ LCD TV supports 720p. I have to say it was amazing how much difference the HDMI cable made compared to the VGA. The picture suddenly became crystal clear.

With the addition of a Blue ray drive and a used SATA-II HD, my setup is complete. It is installed with Windows XP. I had a spare key around, so I saw no reason to run any heavier OS. I don’t run Windows Media Center, can’t stand the software. Instead I run XBox Media Center (aka XBMC) which I will write a review of on its own later.

Links:
HTPC Box: Chieftex HM-03B
Mainboard: ASUS M4A785D-M PRO
CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 240
Software: XBMC