What type of PC do I want inside? Gaming machine? General productivity? Internet surfing?
I have always fancied a HTPC (Home Theatre PC) to sit under the TV and provide movies and music to the living room. So that answers that question.
Suitable components to going inside the NES shell.
Because of the size, everything is going to have to be small and low powered as there is not enough space for loads of forced cooling.
So another shopping list,
Motherboard -> Smaller is better, micro-atx, atx, out of the question.
Processor -> Does not really need to insanely over the top powerful, for movies and music.
RAM -> 2 to 4 GB is fine for the type of computing I need.
Power Supply -> Enough to power hard drive and optical drive and motherboard.
Graphics Card -> FullHD Tv 1920x1080.
Hard Drive -> Bigger is better for storing movies and music.
Optical Drive -> Slim line would be great, slot loading perfect.
To the internet......
<--Weeks Later-->
... so many websites and forums viewed.
And the hardware comes down to this.
One Zotac IONITX A-U provided by mini-itx.com. This covers processor, graphics, motherboard, power supply.
The IONITX A-U is a 1.6Ghz Atom Dual Core Processor paired with an Nvidia ION Graphics card based on the 9400M Chip found in most laptops and my Macbook pro in a Mini-ITX form factor. So 17cm by 17cm. Its completely silent as the power supply is a 90Watt "brick" and the CPU fan is optional.
The motherboard supports DDR2, so I got a Crucial Ballistix 2GB 800Mhz CL4 memory.
For the optical drive I found a samsung slim line slot loading and got the adaptor so there is wont be any problems down the line with SATA and power cables not fitting.
As for the Hard Drive, I have a unused 1TB drive to hand.
Quick hardware test to ensure its not DOA. The hand is there to show how small it really is.
