It wasn’t easy as I tried to cut costs in the beginning by buying a used MB off a forum member. Not here though.
IT was an XFX Nvidia 8200 IG based board. It had E-Sata and it was AMD so I thought it was the perfect solution. He sold it for 60. I ordered a BE-2400 processor from newegg for 25 bucks and a coolermaster short HSF for 9 bucks. Then at the local Fry’s they had an ANtec Neo 550 Watt PSU. A little big for what I wanted but it is quiet and at 50 bucks it was half off.
I already had a 2 gig stick of DDR, a MATX case and a 750 GB drive. So I put it all together and Vista 64 did not have drivers for the SM Bus or coprocessor. And the XFX site was useless. LAter I saw that the reviews at newegg had all the same issues I was having. So off to Fry’s again. Not only did they take this board back I bought from someone else they gave me the retail price of 109 for it. So I went with the second best board IMO.
The Gigabyte 780 s2h. My first choice would of been the version with sideport memory.
But this board installed perfectly. I put VMC 64 ultimate on it, Cyberlink BD player, a lite on BD drive and use my HDHR for HD tv. With the money I made on returning the board I bought an internal flash card reader which also added Firewire, USB and audio ports to the front of the case.
I might still get some soundproofing for it but currently the only thing you can hear if you are close to it is the POS seagate drives. They sound like crickets when seeking. Other than that the BE-2400 and IG graphics handle Blu-ray perfectly. I have it hooked up to my 60″ Sony RPTV.
For chrismtas I’ll be asking for a new HTPC case. Now that I have a card reader that is one requirement I can knock off the list for the case.
I still have to add MyMovies and find a working Netflix addin. The last one I tried was very unrefined and did not work well.
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