Slowly but surely, the pieces have been coming together for my home theater PC (a.k.a. HTPC). About a month ago, I bought the case linked below, the Silverstone LC-14M along with the Seasonic S12 power supply. A couple weeks ago, I ordered a sound card to go in my main system and my X-Fi will be moved over to the HTPC. And yesterday, I ordered a Plextor 716-SA DVD+-RW DL from Newegg and then stopped by Microcenter to pick up a hard drive.

While I could have found a larger drive cheaper somewhere other than Microcenter, I was able to get a Samsung Spinpoint P80 with a Nidec motor which is rated by Silent PC Review.com as the "best" quiet drive. When combined with the Seasonic S12, one of the most highly regarded quiet PSU's, the HTPC should be near silent.

Of course, that's "near" as it will give off noise - especially when in heavy use, but it will be inaudible and the other two computers in my room will be the main noisemakers (though if the Seasonic S12 is as quiet as advertised, I'll probably buy 2 more of them to replace the power supplies in my two current computers.

So now, I've got the case, power supply, hard drive and sound card. Up next - the guts. The guts are coming from my current computer - an AMD Athlon 3700 on an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium with an eVGA 6800 video card and 2 GB of RAM. And my current computer will be upgraded - placing the order later tonight to:

AMD Opteron 175 (Dual Core 2.2GHz, 1MB cache per core)
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu Cooler
2 GB OCZ Platinum RAM
eVGA (or BFG) 7800 GT video card with Dual-DVI

URL: silverstonetek.com.products lc14M