Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds

The First Try: AMD 780G

Last month AMD launched its 780G chipset and a new Athlon X2 processor, the 4850e. The Athlon X2 4850e is a 45W energy efficient part, it runs at 2.5GHz with a 512KB L2 per core - it's basically a cooler running Athlon X2 4800+. The chip is also dirt cheap at $87. Seeing as how the 780G has full hardware decode acceleration for H.264/VC1/MPEG-2 I could actually go with a slower CPU but there are benefits to having something a little more reasonable than the bare minimum requirements.

I didn't even attempt cable management in this first build, I was just happy to get everything in there without bleeding out.

I started with the 780G/4850e combo, the motherboard I used was Gigabyte's GA-MA78GM-S2H and honestly the board has been flawless. I'm using the 385W Enermax Pro82+ we reviewed to power the system.