It's done and running. For a few weeks in fact. So to wrap up lets see what we've done:
- Intel Core 2 Duo 4300. It's been overclocked to 2.16 GHz. I've run Prime95 to burn it in and no crashes or lockups so far.
- ASROCK Conroe945G-DVI Motherboard. It was a good bargain and it has a limited ability to be tweaked. Since this is going into a MediaCenter a micro-ATX was essential. It also had to be silent and not use a lot of power since it was going to be running most of the time.
- 2GB of DDR2-6400 RAM. Plenty of memory for a hungry Vista.
- 500GB Seagate SATA2 hard drive. I've always liked seagate, They have pretty fast drives and a good warranty (5 years). But damn this thing is loud. If I knew I would have gotten the WD which, I've read, is much quieter.
- Cheap noname brand case. I really have no idea who made it, but the form factor was right (desktop case with CD drive door oriented in the proper direction) and it had the newer power supply that is required for the motherboard.
I also bought a few odds and ends and got a great deal on Windows Vista Home Premium at the same time. Since this is the media center PC I wanted lots of storage since most of my iTunes catalog will be stored here. I also bought an DVI-HDMI cable to connect it to my HDTV TV. Eventually I'm going to upgrade the video card to something beefier than the built in Intel 950GMA. Windows Vista gives my setup a 3 due to the weak performance of the card. I'm also looking for a proper windows media center remote. And especially the new Sideshow enabled media remotes.
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