This build was to be installed into a living room and connected to a 1080 HD TV and a NAS. It was mainly going to be used for playing media content such as TV, films and music. The case needed to be small enough to integrate into a living space but did not need to be particularly discreet. The Antec MINUET 350 Case has a reasonably small footprint and is good value for money with the PSU included in the price.
Most of the media content would be stored on the NAS, so drive space was not a major concern but the customer was intending to upload photos and videos from cameras and smartphones so we decided to install a 1TB Seagate Barracuda to ensure that there was enough space for the future. We also installed a card reader into the 3.5″ bay so transferring media from cameras would be easier.
The Intel Pentium G840 was more than capable of handling all the media tasks and is very reasonably priced.
The unit was running Windows 8 64 with VLC and Winamp handling a lot of the media playback. The customer had quite a few films they had ripped from DVD on the NAS and the nice thing about VLC is that it will play DVD image files as well as media files.
We also installed a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR900 DVB-T USB tuner which also has an analog input. I really like the Hauppage products. The software is easy to use, stable and fully supports Windows 8. This allowed the customer to schedule record TV programs and also connect an old VHS video recorder so they could watch and also record old videos on the computer.
The full spec…
- Antec Minuet Piano Black Slimline PC Case inc 350w 80+ PSU
- Asus P8H61-M LE Rev 3.0 Motherboard
- Intel Pentium G840 (2.8GHz,65W,32nm,3MB)
- 4GB kit (2GBx2) 240-pin DIMM DDR3 PC3-12800 CL=11 Unbuffered NON-ECC
- Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1 TB 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive
- CIT IO-001B USB2 3.5″ Internal Card Reader with SIM slot
- Hauppauge WinTV-HVR900 DVB-T USB Tuner.
- LiteOn iHBS112 BLU-RAY WRITER
