Alright, the media PC is now functional…although I am still having trouble playing a DVD through Windows Media Center. Otherwise, the machine is pretty incredible. It is lightning fast and rips CDs to 320K MP3 in about 2 minutes. It is pretty amazing. Radio and TV reception are working great. I now want to get the HDTV card that I did not order to test that out as well. I noticed that Newegg is having a sale on “refurbished” ATI HDTV cards that are not refurbished. I still may pick one up as they are about $100 and they retail for almost twice that on Newegg. I did run into a problem when building the system. For one, the ASUS board I am using has a 24 pin ATX connector rather than the standard 20 pin. The power supply I needed was an ATX 12V 2.0 rather than the ATX12V compliant power supply. The v2.0 has the 24 pin connector, 4 pin auxilliary connector as well as the 6 pin 75w PCI-E video card power connector.

UPDATE:

Well, about a month after I built this machine up, the Sapphire Theatrix Pro 550 TV Tuner Card died. I am not sure what happened, but it just went out. It has taken me a bit of time to getting around to replacing it and now that I have, I have realized that the picture on the Theatrix 550 is far superior to that of the regular tuner in the television or in my Tivo. It is really amazing…even Danielle made a comment about it out of the blue the other night. The other thing I want to point out is that NewEgg could be the best online store I have ever dealt with. These guys have actually thought through all of their systems. Their RMA system is fully automated and you can look up past orders (and every item in them), simply select the item and get an RMA. They are on top of their game and I would recommend them to anyone. The great prices and super cheap and fast shipping is second to none. I have another tuner card on the way, so I will try and report back soon on a two tuner setup…which should be really nice. I will also be putting another 1GB of DDR2 533 RAM in this thing as some of the video and downloading I am doing is slowing things down a bit at times. No worries though, the ASUS board supports 4GB.

The other problem I ran into was that the P4 heatsink was not fully seated on top of the processor which caused the system to shut down after running for about 10 seconds due to potential overheating. I could not figure this out and I finally called ASUS tech support (whose number is printed on the inside cover of the manual in big print) on Saturday morning at 8am…and they answered! Go ASUS. The guy I spoke to had me pull the CPU and the board told me that there is no CPU installed (because it has a POST voice error prompt). The machine stayed running. He told me that the CPU was overheating and that there may be too much grease on there and to re-seat the heatsink. After tearing up my hands, I got that thing on there and it has run perfectly ever since.

One thing to take into consideration if you are going to build a P4 system like this…heat. This thing has a 480W power supply and 2 auxilliary fans in the case. It puts out a lot of heat. Heat is bad for component life. So, think about the case and where it will be located before you build one.