Building the Perfect PC

Hardware Design Criteria

With the functional requirements determined, the next step was to establish design criteria for the HTPC hardware. To the lower left are the relative priorities we assigned for the HTPC.

Table 6-1. DESIGN PRIORITIES

Price
Reliability
Size
Noise level
Expandability
Processor performance
Video performance
Disk capacity/performance

Here’s the breakdown:

Price

Price is an issue, but only in the sense that we’d like the total price of the system to be the same or lower than the cumulative price of the several components it replaces. Accordingly, we’ll use only first-rate components in this system, and if spending a few extra dollars buys ...