1 - A Hiper Introduction

Hiper Media Center HTPC Slimline bareboneSKU: HMC-2K53A-A3
Price: 299 USD
Info: hipergroup.com

Home Theater PCs (HTPC) are a hot thing these days. A lot of you figured out how easy it is to playback recorded content on a nice phat HD telly combined with excellent image reproduction that a PC can deliver you. Or what about playing music over the PC, watching photo's .. heck even play games. The options are surely grand, usually so is the price.

Typically for a nice HTPC chassis alone you have to to drop 150-300 USD, easily. Then you still need to purchase the actual PC components you want to place inside that chassis. Though a great project it's often a very expensive one, and usually due to that factor people end up using their bulky PC next to that telly.

There are some manufacturers on the market that can meet you half or full way. Full way would be a complete HTPC usually priced around 1000 USD. Half-way would be a barebone HTPC. And that's where we land today at Hiper. The Hiper Group is a UK based company that actually started their business back in 2002 already. Their name is short for High Performance Group. They make Power supplies (we'll review some pretty soon actually) yet they also have expanded their product range to include keyboards, fans, accessories, cases and Media center PCs. Though their main focus always has been the EU market; we noticed that they begun selling through online retailer Newegg as well.

Hiper recently released a new model of their slim-line HTPC barebone chassis, with VFD (display) fully integrated mainboard and PSU. Pretty much you drop a HD, a slice of memory and a processor in this system and you are good to go since the mainboard even has support for multi-channel audio, VGA & HDMI output as it's based on the reputable AMD 690G chipset (mainboard with integrated graphics card). And next to all that, it even comes with a pretty decent remote control.

Now this HTPC barebone is slim, fits regular design Hi-Fi components and get this .. can be purchased for roughly 299 USD. If you apply some quick math you'll conclude pretty quickly that you can build a 100% complete HTPC for just under 500 USD on hardware parts. And that's just not bad.

Today we take that HMC-2K53A-A3 barebone, we'll show you how to build it and then use it. A pretty interesting article if I may say so.

Let's have a quick peek as a picture says more than a thousand words, and then dive into this review.