Which is the Best Home Theater PC

As we all know, a Home Theater Personal Computer or HTPC is a PC dedicated to home cinema. It combines and replaces, in one case, if not all, most of the elements of a classic home cinema. For a home theater setup, you can buy a Blu-ray player, media player, stereo or home automated control, but then again you need good hardware. Now a days, we get a complete build of HTPC available from the market as well and we dont have to build each and every part individually. So, here I am going to give you some list of HTPC, just vote for the one that you like or you can even list your suggestions in your replies.

The best that I have personally used is Alienware Hangar 18. This Media Center PC is based on AMD configuration that comes with Athlon 64 X2 processor, up to 4GB of RAM and a hard disk of 250 GB to 2TB (2 x 1TB). The graphic part is based on an integrated chipset that gives HDMI 720p or from a graphics card that gives HDMI 1080p, both from nVidia. The connectivity includes Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, S-Video, 4x USB, Firewire and a memory card reader. Finally, a 1000 watt amplifier is integrated in order to directly connect to the speakers. It is a very powerful configuration with upto 4 TV tuners card and the design is also solid.

The Cyberpower Media Center PC Ultra 9000 is also a very good htpc that I was previously owning. It come with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, Nforce 4 SLI mobo, GeForce 7600 graphics card with 2gb of ram and 2x250GB hard drive. It also comes with DVD burner and wireless keyboard and mouse with a wireless network adapter built-in. It gives an excellent living room experience with its outstanding 3D graphics as well.

The Dell XPS 420 also comes with a robust configuration for video card encoding and accelerating SideShow. It is a high-end model from Dell with a a motherboard based on X38 chipset, support for Core 2 Quad, the eSATA, etc. This configuration also comes with 2 new features, that is; a Dell Xcelerator card and a SideShow display. The Xcelerator board is designed to accelerate video encoding in MPEG-4 (it could double the performance) while the SideShow Screen is a new feature of Windows Vista, that allows some basic operations (such as read emails or listen to music) without turning on the PC. This device is still quite rare and it did not really convince few users of this technology.