Intel E2140 Allendale 65w Dual Core CPU

Gigabyte 73-PVM-S2H System Board

ATI Radeon X1900GT 256MB VIVO PCIe Graphics Card

2GB DDR2 667 System Memory

Western Digital 500GB 16Mb cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Sony SATA 20X DVD-R/W

Antec 430 watt TruePower 2.0 Power Supply

Gyration Black USB/RF Wireless Keyboard and Air/Optical Mouse

802.11G PCI Wireless Network Interface Card

nMedia Silver Aluminum HTPC Media Center Chassis

Windows Vista Home Premium

This is one very good looking brushed aluminum Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC) chassis.
The LCD display is one of the nicest onces we've seen recently. Mike is sure to be pleased!

For an HTPC chassis, this model is surprisingly spacious inside. The power supply mounts in the front left corner. There are vents at the bottom of the case and on the left side. This permits the power supply to pull in cool air on the bottom, and vent it directly outside, having no effect on interior air flow. Very interesting.

Oddly, the manufacturer chose to use a 4 pin Molex connector for the power LED. We haven't seen this in years! While this would work just fine, it creates a wiring fiasco. So as usual, we opted to remove the factory connector and crimp and solder in the correct motherboard header connector.

Correct motherboard header connector installed (Green/White wire)

HTPC's are notoriously difficult to wire. There's many more cables required for the LCD, IR Remote and various other "extras". This means a lot more wiring to clean up! This front panel harness needed some TLC. Mil-spec lacing cord was used to secure the entire harness assembly to prevent wiring damage.

This CPU is an excellent choice for an affordable Home Theater PC. It's based on the Dual-Core Conroe Die, runs at 1.6Ghz and draws only 65w of power. Plenty of performance, a great price and runs cool which is very important in an HTPC. After all, you want to hear your movies or your music, not the cooling fans!

Once again Gigabyte delivers a great system board at a great price. This board includes more features in a tiny Micro-ATX form factor, than many manufacturers include in full size boards.

This board features an impressive array of connections: PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse, VGA, DVI, HDMI!, SPDIF, 4 USB, 1394(Firewire), eSATA!, and 8 channel audio. To say this is impressive in a Micro-ATX board can be considered an understatement. Especially when you consider the average price point of this component.

The moment of truth. Pressing the power button for the first time. She fired right up without any problems!

We typically run memtest86 on first boot to check the system memory.
10+ hours with no failures. All is well with the memory. Time to install Windows.

In addition to Memtest for testing memory, we also run Prime95 to torture test the CPU. Have you've ever wondered what is the point of torturing new parts? Well..... they're new. We would much rather identify a defective part now than after we deliver to our client!