Hardware Specifications| Motherboard | Intel D945GTPLR mATX desktop board with latest BIOS |
| Processor | Intel P4 630 3.0GHz LGA775 |
| Memory | 2x Geil 512MB DDR2 PC5300 667MHz 4-4-4-12 |
| Graphics | Sapphire Radeon X550 PCIe 256MB with TV out and passive heatsink |
| Hard Drives | 2x Western Digital WD2500KS 7200rpm 250GB SATA |
| Optical Drive | Lite On LDW-411S 4x DVD±R/RW |
| Case | Silverstone LC11M in silver with RC01 PCIe riser kit, incorporates Soungraph iMON VFD/PAD |
| Tuners | 2x Compro Videomate DVB-T200 digital tuners |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Hyper 48 heatsink |
There are several configurations of the D945GTP motherboard, although the differences are generally small please note that everything on this site refers to the "media series" configuration, this board also shares many features in common with the D945GNT and D945GCZ series.
Given that this box will be living under the TV in the lounge, prime considerations are good looks and being quiet enough so as not be a distraction so rather than the innards being ther starting point the case was the first decision, I had a scout around for various HTPC cases and the Silverstone one was head and shoulders to me, so that then fixed the form factor at mATX (actually most HTPCs use that).
So my next choice is what processor (keeping an eye on what suitable motherboards) I've tended to stick with Intel for my PCs but I did consider AMD better price/heat performance, luckily neither Pacifica or Vanderpool chips were available at the time of my decision.To keep heat and noise down must people would probably pick a single large hard disk, but given the rather poor lifetime of disk drives these days I had already decided I was going to use a combination of RAID so I needed at least two drives, my first thought was to split the drives into a small mirrored system array and a larger striped data array, when the case was decided on it would actually take three drives and i umm'ed and arr'ed for while thinking about the option of a parity stripe for the data array, but eventually I decided against having three disks for heat/noise reasons and I think that was the right decision.
Initially I stuck with the stock HSF supplied with the CPU, of course it did the job, but it was not the quietest and the CPU actually idled at about 50°C which according to Intel's monitoring software is in the middle of the "yellow zone" and could easily be pushed to the edge of the "red zone". So I wanted to upgrade to the best heatsink that would fit the case, I didn't have much headroom to play with, the Silverstone guide claims that any heatsink less than 75mm high will fit, so a bit more scouting later and the Hyper48 looked like it would fit, it's height was 70mm according to Cooler Master's website, so I ordered one, when it arrived it was obvious within about 2 seconds that there was no way it was going to fit, and in fact the height of the heatsink itself is 70mm plus 25mm of fan. Oh dear, after a bit of thought I decided that instead of sending it back I might just get away with removing the fan and the aluminium shroud, cutting a hole in the bottom of the case and re-using the fan from the stock HSF.