Thermaltake Mozart VC4000 HTPC Case
July 9, 2007
By Rory Buszka

There are still plenty of reasons to consider a home theater PC these days. In addition to simply recording over-the-air television like a DVR, home theater PCs can store your entire music collection, and even your DVDs (with enough storage space), and can even place big-screen, surround-sound gaming within easy reach.

Some industry have audaciously declared the HTPC to be a failed technology, citing the comparatively complex keyboard-and-mouse control scheme of HTPCs when compared to set-top-box media extender units like the Microsoft XBOX 360 and the Apple TV, which stream data directly from your home PC and can be controlled with just an infrared remote or game controller.

However, all is not so rosy for media extenders. A media extender itself is much like a PC in many ways, with a CPU, a GPU, a hard drive, and memory – the difference is that a media extender's hardware is tightly integrated with its software, so the CPU and GPU can be somewhat less powerful than those in a HTPC. The current Apple TV uses a 1GHz Pentium M CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300GPU, and has 256MB of DDR2 400 SDRAM.

Yet, consumers are unwilling to pay high prices for what they view to be a comparatively simpler appliance, so margins on media extenders are far slimmer than on fully-fledged HTPCs running Windows Media Center Edition 2005 or Vista Home Premium, so much so that many media extenders are practically subsidized by the company that produces them, in hopes that digitally-delivered content sales will make the entire venture profitable.

Tech Gage
complete article