When it comes to selecting the components for your home theatre PC (HTPC), the one biggest problem is how to balance performance and heat. Since heat needs to be exhausted away from the computer, and the primary way to do that is with fans, it would stand to reason that the higher performing a component you want to install the noisier it’ll be. The two components that have the most effect on this are the video card and CPU. With video processing duties specific to home theatre and multimedia applications moving onto the motherboard we’re basically left with the CPU.
