The Assembly

The memory stick was easy to insert and the motherboard came with SATA cable and power connector for the HDD, so that part was easy.

Since I want to place the HTPC in a cabinet along with my HiFi-gear, I don't really want to fork out the money for a fancy case. So I decided to just mount the motherboard on a piece of cardboard with a few pieces of scotch tape :-).

I did the same with the hard drive, so it could just lie next to the motherboard in the metal cabinet.

For power I used the 5$ (12V, 5A) power brick bought on ebay from Hong Kong, and it plugs right in to the motherboard.

When I wanted to hook up the audio out to my DTS receiver, I hit the first snag - the

D945GSEJT does not come with a cable or bracket for SPDIF digital out. Oh well, it has a header on the motherboard, that uses the same kind of plug that a HDD led cable for connecting a motherboard to a case LED, so I sourced such a plug from another computer and soldered an RCA cable and jack to it. Problem solved.

The setup looks a bit messy, but who cares when it is locked away in a cabinet.