TVSquad

In this day and age you can pick up a desktop computer at the mall for a couple hundred dollars. Slap a TV tuner in it and you've got a home theater PC, or HTPC. But what if you want something that looks good in the living room, has a quiet fan, and can handle HDTV?

The folks at Missing Remote have put together an excellent guide for building an HTPC that you'd be proud to put next to your TV, all for under a grand.The guide tackles everything from the CPU and motherboard to the video card and RAM. It's a pretty long read, and if you know the basics of building computers, you can skip over most of it. But I paid special attention to the case and cooling solutions.

You see, that cheap computer with a TV tuner in it that I mentioned at the top of the article? That's what I've got sitting in my living room. And while I'm not convinced that it's worth spending $200+ to get a shiny black case that makes my computer look like a VCR, I can tell you that the fans in my PC are loud. So loud that we wind up watching TV at a much higher volume than we probably should. So I'll probably be checking out the recommended CPU coolers from Zalman and Arctic Cooling.

Turns out both manufacturers have CPU heat sink/fans for the budget-minded. Make sure to read to the end of the article to check out suggested HTPC builds from each of Missing Remote's writers.