The Diamond Age mini-series!

Apparently, Mark Burnett and George Clooney are going to be producing a mini-series based on Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Stephenson himself is going to be writing the adaptation. Mark Burnett's involvement confuses me a little, but I enjoy most things that Clooney is involved in. With Stephenson writing, I think this has a chance of living up to the book.

HTPC on order

While I'm still trying to figure out which HDTV to get, I've decided to go ahead and assemble a home theater PC (HTPC). I'm hoping to be able to display a full 1080p (1920x1080) image to whichever set I end up getting.

For DVR software, I plan on giving MythTV another try. My last attempt at a MythTV-powered HTPC sputtered out due to what I now believe to be a crappy SATA controller card.

Here are the components I'm going to be using:

Enclosure - Silverstone LC-17

Silverstone makes a range of home theaterish PC enclosures. The LC17 is at the lower end of their offerings since it doesn't have any sort of display built into it, but it will fit a full ATX motherboard.

Processor - Athlon 64 X2 3800+

This isn't the fastest part, but I don't want too much heat output since I want to keep this case as quiet as possible. Hopefully, having two cores will help with being able to watch a show while transcoding another.

RAM - Corsair ValueSelect DDR2-667 2GB

Corsair has always performed for me in the past so I just went with them again.

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-57SLI-S4

For motherboards and video cards, I try to only buy Gigabyte or Asus these days since I've been burnt by almost every other manufacturer I've tried. I was going to get the Asus non-SLI nForce 570 board, but it didn't have Firewire so I went with this board instead.

Video Card - Gigabyte GV-NX76G256D-RH

The 7600GS seemed like a good middle of the road performance video card, and this card has a passive cooling solution so it should work well in an HTPC environment.

DVD Burner - Liteon LH-20A1H-185

Liteon always seems to have a good selection of cheap DVD burners. I considered buying a Plextor, but I saw a lot reliability problems in the reviews I read.

Power Supply - Seasonic S12-380

I've read a lot of good things about Seasonic power supplies being dependable and quiet so I decided to give one a try.

Hard Drives - 2x 250GB SATA

For the HTPC I attempted last year, I bought a few 250GB SATA drives. I plan on using two of them in a RAID 1 configuration for this HTPC.