Article Date: 25th July 2002 Created By: Michael "Hughesey" Hughes

Hardware Specifications

Case - Heavily modified Panasonic NV-SD400 VCR casing.
Lets face it. What integrates better into a modern home theater system than something we just pulled out of a modern home theater system :). The VCR was non working, so why not put it to good use.

Motherboard - Gigabyte 8SIML.
This motherboard was chosen due to its compact Micro ATX size, and onboard peripherals. It comes with onboard video, onboard sound and onboard 10/100 networking, all of which save space when working with such a small case. Read our review if this board here.

CPU - Intel Pentium 4 1.6A
The Pentium 4 was chosen over the AthlonXP simply because of heat issues. The CPU had to be kept cool with minimal case cooling, and as slow fans as we could find (to reduce noise). If we had more room to work with, we might have gone with an AthlonXP and a Zalman cooler, but this was not the case. Some may argue that such a processor isn't needed for simple DVD playing etc., but certain emulators (PS2) require SSE2 to function. Also this box will be used as a LAN box, hence it needs a little more grunt than simple DVD playing requires.

RAM - 512MB Generic PC2100 DDR
Since the Pentium 4 is only operating on a 100MHZ FSB, PC2100 ram is more than adequate. This gives us plenty of overclocking headroom should the need arise, and also provides plenty of memory bandwidth.

Video Card - Nvidia Geforce 4 MX-420
At the time that the HEPC was constructed, this was the most powerful "Low Profile" video card we could find. Since this box will also be used as a LAN box, we decided to use this card instead of the onboard video + VGA -> TV converter, as this card provides much more 3D power. It has recently come to my attention that there are "Low Profile" Radeon 8500 based video cards, so in the future, this card may be replaced with a Radeon 8500 based card which would offer better performance and TV-OUT quality.

Hard Drive - Western Digital 200EB (20GB 5400RPM)
The hard drive chosen wasn't really of great concern to us, as most hard drives can handle the tasks we required just fine. We chose the Western Digital 200EB since it was extremely quiet, and didn't produce much heat (thanks to it being only 5400rpm).

CD-ROM Drive - LG 32 x 8 x 12 x 8 CDRW/DVD
This drive was chosen since it had ample DVD playback speed (8x) and also functions as a burner for use at LAN's. It is also approximately 10mm shorter (from front to back) than any other combo drive we could find, and we needed every millimeter of space we could get our hands on.

Power Supply - Modified HP Pavillion 6611 Power Supply
Looking around at small power supplies, it became increasingly obvious that finding a power supply that would suit my this system was going to be a hard task. Even FlexATX power supplies were too deep for what space we had, so as a last resort, an old HP Micro ATX power supply was used, albeit with some modifications. We had to remove the top of the power supply, as well as cut back some of its other casing. We opted not to remove the power supply from the casing altogether as other parts in the system are in close proximity, and we needed an earthed piece of metal in-between the power supply and these parts. The power supply is rated at 85W, and although we were skeptical as to whether it would run the P4/GF4MX based system, it hasn't had any trouble so far.

LCD - CrystalFontz 16x2 Blue LCD
Since the LCD would be placed behind the original perspex cover where the original LCD was, we needed a colour where the background would not shine through, but the text would, and the CrystalFontz Blue LCD did the trick perfectly.

Keyboard/Mouse - BTC 5110S Wireless Keyboard/Mouse
Obviously in this situation, a corded keyboard just wouldn't cut it. So we decided to go wireless. Read our review of this keyboard/mouse combo here.