I recently bought components to build my own media center PC.  The primary purpose is to be able to conveniently rip my CDs to mp3 and listen to them on my stereo.  The secondary purpose is to be a Personal Video Recorder, since we don't already have a TiVo or anything.  I've had some problems getting the PC up and running, though.  Here are the components I went with, along with comments about my experience so far.

• Asus K8V SE Deluxe mobo
• I read about this mobo in Computer Power User, or a similar mag, and it was rated favorably.  I think it's actually intended more as an over-clocking board for gamers, and over-clocking isn't my thing, but whatever.  This piece has been my most significant source of angst so far, though.  The problem is that it came with an old bios revision, which wasn't compatible with my processor, or possibly just not compat w/ 64-bit WinXP.  Suffice to say, I managed to get XP installed, but it wouldn't boot after that.  In booting to safe mode, it appeared that the last driver to load was ACPI-related, so I was pretty confident that a bios upgrade was in order at that point.  But the bios update failed, even after I tried the latest flash tool and image from the Asus website!  Now the board won't POST, and I'm waiting for a new bios chip from Asus.  The latter is costing me $40 in order to not have to wait two weeks for it to show up.  Not cool.  I fault both Asus and Directon.com for supplying me w/ gear that's out of date and not compatible.  How hard would it be for them to pop the latest bios into the board when they ship it to the customer?
• AMD64 2800+
• This proc is getting to be a bit slow these days clock-speed wise, but it's damn affordable and still pretty fast.
• 512 MB RAM
• I decided not to go with a gig in order to save $$ to spend on the other components.
• 80 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda HDD
• This is basic stuff at this point - SATA has apparently become the standard gear for performance PCs (as opposed to servers, for which SCSI still makes sense) since it's fast and it versatile in multi-drive configurations.  However, 64-bit XP couldn't find my drive during setup, by default.  This was really weird, because I built a similarly configured PC about six months ago and it worked just fine (see my earlier post).  Anyone have any idea what's up with this?  Anyway, it didn't occur to me to try installing a 3rd-party SATA driver during setup, so I instead configured it as a one-drive RAID "array" and installed the appropriate driver for that instead.  Interestingly, this mobo has two different RAID controllers present.  But this seems to be working, assuming I can get the bios fixed.  
• Antec Phantom 350W Fanless PSU
• I spent a bit extra on the PSU in order to make the machine as quiet as possible.  This thing is built like a big heat sink, which is expected.  The tradeoff is that I'm not using a tower case, so everything's packed pretty close together, and during my initial boot testing the components were getting pretty hot.  My gut feeling at this point is that I should have bought a fan-based PSU w/ a really quiet fan since that might have kept the overall PC cooler, but finding a quiet fan seems really hit or miss.
• Black Lian-Li Desktop PC-V800B case
• I think this case looks great, and it's solidly built, in accordance w/ Lian-Li's reputation.  The front of the unit reminds me of a power amp, so it should look right at home in a media center.  One hitch, the 3.5" drive bays require plastic rails that let the disk simply slide in.  I've been told that those are proprietary.  But the box didn't come with any!  As a result, the optical, floppy, and hard disks are stacked right on top of each other at the front of the case, since I can't use the separate bays off to the side without finding the darn brackets.  That's not helping air circulation, I'm guessing.
• ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro, 128 MB, AGP8x video card
• I consider this to be the component I took the biggest risk with, for a couple of reasons.  First, it's an older model, which let me save some cash.  Second, the newest cards are PCI Express, which in some situations can apparently be much faster than AGP, although requires a supporting mobo, which the above does not.  Third, I read that if you really want to do television PVR, you should buy a separate Haupage TV tuner, which I wanted to avoid, again for cost reasons.  Finally, although I didn't learn this until afterward, my buddy Gus bought this until a year or so ago and had poor results w/ the ATI's driver quality.  I sincerely hope they've cleaned up their act since then, or else I'm going to feel really screwed on this purchase.

Anyway, I'll post on update once the new bios chip comes.  I'm still on the fence about whether to really try to use this new machine w/ 64-bit XP, or to chicken out and use 32-bit Windows MCE instead.  All of my drivers (except the printer ...) seem to be available on 64-bit, but it still might be too much of a hassle to not be using the built-in features of MCE.