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The Ultimate Media Center for Under $400 -- Episode 297

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element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

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In this episode Felix puts together the components necessary to build an Arch Linux based media center PC for your living room.  Things to consider when putting together your own computer system include cooling, wiring, airflow, and ensuring the setup properly.  Have ever created a custom media center PC?  What components and OS did you use to complete your system?  Let us know in the comments below!

 

 

Felix assembles stack of budget grade parts to keep his media center under $400. His parts include a mini ITX form factor case, an ASRock AM1H-ITX Mini ITX motherboard, an Artic M1-Passive fanless heatsink to provide passive cooling without the extra noise of a fan running, an AMD Athlon 5350 Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), a 120 GB SSD from Kingston, some thermal paste for the heatsink, and finally 16 GB of DDR3 RAM from Kingston.

 

Felix starts with the enclosure which is all metal.  He then places the ASRock AM1H-ITX Mini ITX motherboard in the enclosure. He then puts in the microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices.  He demonstrates how to orient the microprocessor in the motherboard. There is a locking tab to makes the connection so you don’t need to apply any pressure to it.

 

Next, he’s ready to add the fanless heatsink to the unit. He’ll need to screw the heatsink on from underneath without smearing the grease.  Once the processor is installed, it’s time to drop in some RAM. This consists of two sticks of eight gigabytes. He connects the hard drive LED power button and reset button. He also connects the audio interface and the USB for the side.

 

He then gets the power supply installed. He considers wire management and where to mount the hard drive. He opts to install an existing harddrive he has on hand, rather than using the harddrive he was originally going to use, because it already has an operating system installed on it.

 

Once everything is set up Felix walks you through Kodi, the Arch Linux operating system, and games that you can play with your media center.  Karen joins Felix to play a game on the newly assembled machine.

 

Disclaimer

  • how come you don't post the link to the build in the comment section or in the description section? You put it in the video but then we have to paause it and type it in manually, trains going back and forth between the browser and the video. wouldn't it be a lot easier just to post links that you have advertised in the video right into the description section so we can just click on it? That's my only pet peeve I've got. But I noticed you do that to almost all your videos that you post :-)

  • My HTPC probably has the same function as yours, though a generation or 2 older at least (and showing it's age a bit image :

    Antec Veris Chassis
    Asus F1A75m1-pro
    A8-37XX black edition
    Kingston hyperx ddr3 - 2 x 8gb
    Kingston HyperX ssd - 128Gb

    Blu-ray Writing optical drive...
    Asus Radeon HD6670 used in dual-graphics Xfire

    Built it the day Diablo III came out to do 1080p gaming on my TV, 5 years later it's still tick tocking.

  • My media center build consists of an Azulle access plus stick and a 128 gb sdhc microsd card. Costs about $200 for both and it has 4gb of DDR3L and an intel atom z8300. The Azulle was hard to beat for value coming preloaded with Windows 10 but it's also very anemic and only has 32gb of onboard storage which is almost all used up by the Windows OS. I'm thinking of building a better one out of an UDOO x86 ultra which is a newer SBC with a N3710 intel atom and 8gb of ram.

  • Nice to see Felix get the spot light for an episode.

    Nice job of explaining the build and showing the users how to use it.

     

    DAB

  • One could argue about it being a Media Center PC, but I for one use a Raspberry Pi 3 for my media center needs, which is plenty for streaming movies and shows off my NAS, watching live streams or videos off YouTube, plus some retro gaming through RetroPie.

     

    But just a Pi in a standard case wasn't quite enough for me, so I tossed it into a broken Master System II that I got off eBay as a tribute to my first ever console.

     

    Here's a picture of my Sega Master System Pi!