Hardware wise it is identical to a normal PC with CPU, RAM, motherboard etc etc but generally put in to more stylish cases specially built to fit in most TV stands.

Case

I opted for an Antec Fusion Black HTPC case which is a fairly nice case, although it can be seen as quite costly at around £100 without a PSU. The case is steal with an aluminium front but even so it doesn’t weigh alot. There is space for 2 hard drives which are secured with rubber grommets to stop vibration and 2 5.25″ slots with one of these slots being used for the LCD display that comes built with the case, but can be taken out. The case has a few ventilation holes around to keep components cool but only has 2 120mm fans which are located on the side of the case near where the CPU will be. Both of these fans are Antec Tri-Cools and as such have the 3 way setting for fan speed, low, medium, high. I have mine set to low which gives off a little bit of noise and gives more than adequate cooling for the rest of the components.

Motherboard

After reading many good reviews I bought the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G Micro-ATX. The GA-MA78GM-S2H uses the AMD 780G chipset which has onboard audio and graphics. The onboard audio is a Realtek chip with your standard analogue in and outs but also has a digital out. The onboard graphics is called the Radeon HD 3200 which is said to be equal in performance to the Radeon HD 3450. The HD 3200 has AVIVO and allows for full hardware acceleration if the software supports it. The HD 3200 gives you VGA, DVI and HDMI which also carries sound. The motherboard also has a feature called Hybrid Graphics Technology. This allows you to put in another graphics card in to the PCI-e 2.0 slot which will be used in a crossfire like situation although AMD refuses to call it crossfire due to the performance levels not being the same. Unfortunately you can just shove any card in there and get this performance. It is obviously limited to AMD/ATi cards only and even then it will only use the power equivalent to the onboard graphics. In this case the best card to put in would be the HD 3450.

CPU

Keeping to an all AMD affair, I got the AMD Athlon X2 4850e which is a low power CPU said to consume only 45W. This also reduces heat which is a top priority in an HTPC as it means you don’t need a noisy fan on it, and this CPU is more than capable of processing any HD media or x264 rips.

RAM

RAM isn’t used that much in an HTPC compared to a gaming PC so I just got 2GB (2x 1GB sticks) of Corsair DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX. Of course you can easily change this to 4GB if you want.

PSU

As I was happy with my current Corsair PSU in my gaming PC I chose to keep my loyalty and got the Corsair CX400W which is more than capable of powering the HTPC with room to spare if I ever wanted to add a new sound card or new graphics card.

Hard drive

Being a Samsung fan due to the low noise from their Spinpoint harddrives, I bought another Samsung SpinPoint F1 500GB to join my growing collection of them. This drive isn’t particularly slow, but obviously won’t keep up with a Western Digital Raptor but is a hell of a lot quieter. This only used up 1 slot, so I still have another slot spare to add another drive in the future if I wanted to.

DVD Drive

Originally I was just going to buy a £20 DVD drive. But then I saw the LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray Reader & HD-DVD ROM. For only £45 more I now have the ability to play Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Although HD-DVD has been beaten by Blu-Ray there is still a lot of HD-DVD stock out there with stores trying to get rid of it. So when you have the choice of getting HD films for as little as £3 it seemed obvious to get a dual player. The only thing I forgot to check about this drive before purchasing was the noise, but I was gladly surprised with in once it was installed. Although not quiet, it wasn’t too noticeable, so when you have a film on you are unlikely to hear it.

Software

At the moment, I don’t have any dedicated software for my HTPC but I have got Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit to install, then I can test with further software to expand the HTPC to be the optimum it can be.

Escapist Magazine

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

The Escapist

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com

Researchers in Israel say they have succeeded in putting a version of the Bible on a chip smaller than a pinhead.

Its 300,000 words in Hebrew were inscribed on a silicon surface at the Haifa Institute of Technology.

Scientists say the aim of the project is to increase young people’s interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

The record for the smallest copy is held by a Bible measuring 2.8×3.4×1cm (1.1×1.3×0.4in), weighing 11.75g (0.4 ounces) and containing 1,514 pages.

The 0.5sq-mm (0.01sq-in) nano-Bible was written on a silicon surface covered with a thin layer of gold (20nanometres thick – 0.0002mm).

It was written using a device called Focused Ion Beam (Fib).

“When we send the particle beam toward a point on the surface, the gold atoms bounce off of this point, thus exposing the silicon layer underneath,” Ohad Zohar, one of the project’s managers at Technion, said.

“By sending a particle beam towards various points on the substrate, we can etch any pattern of points, especially one that represents text.”

The next step for Technion researchers is photographing the Bible and displaying it on a giant wall within the Faculty of Physics.

Source: BBC

What a huge waste of time and resources. Why on earth would they do this, no one is going to be able to read it without an electron microscope anyway, and they could just read the bible in a book.

I am sure it probably cost quite a bit to achieve as well which just makes the whole point of this exercise pointless.

If you want young people to be interested in nanoscience and nanotechnology let them play Crysis on a good computer that can actually run the game properly, that has a nano suit in it. Now that is much more interesting then a book that a large portion of the world hasn’t read and has no interest in reading.

Every Wednesday a new game review is put on to the Escapist Magazine website.

This week Yahtzee is reviewing Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii.

The Escapist