Eco-friendly Windows 7 Media Centre HTPC : A Primer

Choosing a HTPC can be a daunting task, one which will determine the quality of a significant portion of your leisure time if you're an avid consumer of video content.

Get it wrong and you could experience abnormal levels of stuttering, wrong audio levels, excessive power consumption, ridiculous amounts of fan whining and a dreadful journey while watching your movies.

In this article, we will be look at two ways of sourcing your perfect Windows 7-based HTPC which will run older games correctly at low resolutions and will be as energy-efficient as possible. You can either build it or buy it from a reputable seller.

A media PC serves one or all of the following functions : Downloading & Share Torrents & Files, Play audio and video content from stream, optical discs, downloaded files, FTA (Free To Air) satellite or from Freeview HD.

Building your media PC is not as easy as it sounds since you need to make sure you've got the parts right to start with. You can go down two different ways; one which uses Nvidia's popular ION platform coupled with Intel's Atom processor or the other which takes a normal desktop processor and downclocks it significantly.

Motherboards used in HTPC tend to be as integrated as possible for a number of reasons with heat dissipation (and the obligatory use of fans) being one.

Integrated motherboards take us less space which makes cooling and ventilation a less arduous task. It also allows the use of a smaller than usual case.