Today I finally assembled my HTPC. There were some stock issues with the case I ordered, so after a week I ordered another. Although the motherboard is passively cooled I decided to enable one of the two case fans. Unfortunately the fans are very noisy when directly connected to the motherboard, so I placed a simple Zalman fancontroller between the fan and motherboard.
After building the HTPC I first installed Ubuntu 10.10 using a USB stick. Then I used this guide to install XBMC.
Last year I build a home server based on the Intel Atom platform. In my second post I mentioned building an HTPC with the same components, but I wasn’t really sure the current Atom processors and Nvidia ION platform could handle video decoding with a full HD resolution. Since a few weeks I’m looking for information how to build an HTPC running XBMC based on the latest Atom processors with Nvidia ION 2. I found this blog and I think I will use more or less the same parts because it’s a very good price/value solution.