The Media Mandate

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: Medium

THE CONCEPT

IT’S EASY FOR US to forget sometimes that people use computers for more than just gaming, benchmarking, and editing magazines. And that, sometimes, people might even plug their computers into a screen other than a monitor. So, when we got our hands on Fractal Design’s Node 202 case, we knew what we had to do: Build a sleek, powerful, but inexpensive media center, designed to sit snugly beneath the television. The brief for this “Build It” was a little tricky, though—it needed to be a PC that didn’t look like a PC. We needed a Mini-ITX motherboard, HDMI port, and a processor with onboard graphics. Oh, and keep the price as low as possible, thank you very much.

Media center PCs are nothing new, but the components that can be used to make them are continually evolving—albeit at a slower rate than parts for beefy gaming PCs. There’s little to no precedent to fit a GPU inside one of these dinky rigs, and as more processors with onboard graphics are released, so expands our selection of potential builds. The “perfect” media center build may not exist;