Now you have determined which ‘socket’ of motherboard you need it’s time to shop around. Make sure you buy a motherboard with a decent chipset manufacturer such as Nvidia (nforce chipset), Intel, or VIA (the chipset of the motherboard is handles data traffic between your processor, memory, and any peripherals you may have installed).

If you plan to use your  Media Center PC primarily for watching TV and listening to music then you might want to consider opting for a motherboard with on board graphics (graphics card built on to the motherboard), on board sound card, and on board LAN/wireless card. This would pretty much take care of most of the components you would need all on one board. If you’re going to use your Media Center for games at any point then my advice would be to choose a motherboard that doesn’t incorporate on board graphics as the on board graphics built in to motherboards, though they will perform the job of displaying video adequately, don’t tend to be that powerful when it comes to gaming. You could also opt to have a separate sound card that provides higher quality sound it all depends on how serious you are about the sound that’s going to be coming from your HTPC, for most I think the onboard sound would do (tip: whether going for onboard sound or a separate sound card, make sure it’s capable of at least 5.1 surround sound for use when watching DVDs. Even if you only plan on using 2 speakers, these cards can be configured for 2 speaker output). In my HTPC I opted for the MSI K7N2 Delta-L socket A motherboard. It came with onboard LAN and onboard 5.1 sound but I chose to add a separate sound card for reasons I shall divulge later.

Step 4 – Choose your hard drive (HDD).

This should be quite an easy one. Basically bigger is definitely better. You want as much space as you possibly can if you plan to record a lot of films and programs. Don’t be tempted to go for the 10,000 rpm models of hard drive though as they are louder and generate a lot of heat, you probably won’t notice much of a performance gain by using this type of hard drive in a Media Center environment anyhow. In my setup I went for the Maxtor Diamondmax 10 300gb 7200rpm IDE hard drive which is plenty space for all my film recordings and music, I also use my Media Center PC as a file server for my other PC and laptop, so my suggestion is that around 300gb of hard drive space will suffice.

Be sure to choose the type of hard drive interface connection that suits your motherboard, i.e. if your motherboard supports the SATA interface choose a hard drive that also uses the SATA interface. Note that the two interfaces (SATA and IDE) are not interchangeable. The most recent motherboards usually come with both interfaces integrated into the board so you shouldn’t have a problem.

Hard drives are also a big contributor to the noise and heat problem, it might be a wise idea to invest in a hard drive silencer/cooler, I want my HTPC to be as quiet as possible so I went for the Scythe Quiet Drive which is a HDD silencer and cooler all in one.