Home Theatre PC Buyer's Guide - Q1 2009

First Choice: J&W Minix 780G
UK Pricing:£96.54 (Inc. VAT)
US Pricing:$179.20 (ex. Tax)

Based on the excellent AMD 780G chipset, our current little favourite is still the J&W Minix motherboard. This little wonder was the base for Nick's Mod of the Year winning Chiaroscuro and has tonnes of functionality compressed into its 17x17cm PCB. The feature set includes four SATA, HDMI, DVI, VGA, eSATA, S/PDIF and a PCI-Express x16 (x4 electrical) - everything you'd expect from a high end board, and more.

HIS ATI Radeon HD 4670 IceQ

Manufacturer:HIS
UK Price (as reviewed):£68.99 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$64.99 (ex. Tax)

Core Clock: 750MHz
Memory Clock: 2,000MHz (effective)
Memory: 512MB GDDR3
Warranty: Three years (parts and labour)

With all our recent coverage of ultra high end graphics launches like the Nvidia Geforce GTX 295, GeForce GTX 285 and ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2,

Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B Network Storage

Manufacturer:Raidsonic
UK Price (as rReviewed):£97.51
US Price (as reviewed):$137.46

While expensive network storage solutions have been available to businesses for many years, consumer NAS boxes are becoming a far more common and more affordable method of file storage and backup for personal or family use. Considering the sheer inexpense of drives a terabyte and above these days, the usefulness of either personal data redundancy, a central storage for the house network, or a very low power BitTorrent download box - all these are appealing prospects, and for under £100, we see if Raidsonic's Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B is worth the money over that upgrade.