Assembly:
The
Cooler Master CM Media 250 HTPC was completed with the following parts:
» Biostar M7NCG400 motherboard
» AMD 2100+ XP processor
» Arctic Cooling 2TC heatsink
» 512MB Corsair PC3200LL RAM
» ATI Radeon 8500 video card
» Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP Expert capture card
» DVD-ROM
» Western Digital hard drive
» Ultra X-Connect PSU
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The CM Media 250 comes with a well written and illustrated installation manual, as well as a small bag of screws and standoffs. The base of the CM Media 250 has almost all of the standoffs you will need for either Micro ATX standard motherboards or ITX style boards already installed. I only needed to add one standoff to install the Biostar board. The picture on the right shows where the board will end up.
Up next was the installation of the Ultra X-Connect power supply. The CM Media 250 has plenty of room to install even the larger cased power supplies without interference. One very nice feature I noticed is Cooler Master drilled the power supply mounting holes to be universal. You can mount your power supply either right side up or upside down depending on how you want the power supply fan to be oriented. I mounted this particular supply upside down.
Next I installed a small older hard drive just for operating system duties. The specifications Cooler Master give show only one 3.5" internal mounting area, however, I could squeeze a second drive under the first and even a third drive under the floppy on the other side. However, this may be better accomplished with a SATA drive due to the connectors on the motherboard being so close. Above the hard drive(s), I installed a black DVD-ROM optical drive.
