Ok so I mostly use MediaPortal for my media HTPC experience (I also use SageTV but thats another story). I never understand why people buy a beautiful HTPC case to sit under their TV then try and cram a gazillion cards and disks in it for storage and TV…. cos then you need more cooling, thus noise and you have a cat’s chance in hell of any real expansion once you realise how sweet a PC based media solution is and want more! <deep breath long sentence >
Soooo, one nice and vital feature of both MediaPortal and SageTV is the ability to locate all the hard disks and capture cards elsewhere, away from your beautiful pristine living room and pretty HTPC case. Storage is sorted, hence my earlier post about my WHS pc, however this post is for the build of my MediaPortal TV server.
Its the old case from the WHS, ample for a TV server. Its got a 110mm fan in the front, and an 80mm fan in the back, plus a dual fan CPU. This thing is on 24 hours a day thus it pays to be well cooled/noisy hence not in my living room.
Overhead shot, note the 110mm fan right in front of the hard disks, nice.
For this system I choose a sempron 3000+ to sit at the heart, YES a lowly little sempron, why? This system is geared for all digital broadcasts, its has a hauppauge nova 500-dt dvb-t tuner (two channels) for Freeview, it also has two hauppauge dvb-s cards for Freesat. Digital channels means no transcoding, all the server has to do is record the digital stream to disk. The sempron is light on the power demand. Notice the Gigabyte motherboard also has 5 PCI slots, ample for more internal tuning cards. For the record this system only has a 450 watt PSU.
Gratuetous card porn – Note the PSU and case fans pulling air from around the CPU
I could squeeze another PCI card next to the graphics card above if I needed to, I’ve tried it 
CPU close-up, nice the way the camera caught the fan blades, this PC was running when the pics were took!
External cables
Another reason why you don’t want all the TV cards in your HTPC, I’d hate having all this round the media cabinet under my TV in the living room.
Specs
CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7VT600-P
RAM: 2GB DDR400
Storage: This system may have two hard disks but all storage is handled by netcentral the WHS server
Graphics: Who cares it just does TV capture so is not an issue
O/S: Win XP SP2
Duties
MediaPortal TV server
Electronic TV Guide grabber (Radio Times and DigiGuide)
Ninan (binary news downloader with web based interface)
Misc
Typical case temp: 28C
Typical CPU temp: 30C