Suggestions on a media center

My old 7950GT's fan stopped working and it overheated and fried itself about a month and a half ago. It was barely covered under Asus' 3 year warranty so I sent it in. Fedex just sent it back to me today. I open it up and they replaced it with a new 9600GT. Fuck yea. Sadly though, they took too long and I can't return the GTX 260 that I bought in the meantime. I have enough leftover parts to build a second desktop soon and I was planning on using it as a media center anyways.

Any thoughts on how to build a bitchin' Media Center?

It really does depend on your preferences in regards to sound, look, and sound levels of the hardware. The graphics card is not really important in a media center.
First of you have to decide on what quality of sound you want, since 5.1 or 7.1 sound cards does come in different quality and with different price tags attached.
Second you will want to think about the physical look of the media center, since a media center often is placed in a convinient easily visible location of the appartment/house, so you will most likely want it to look nice or cool.
The third thing is again sound, but this time we are talking about the noize from fans, harddrives and optical drives. Each of these can be annoing when you want to watch a movie or listen to some music. The fans part is easy, just buy good quality ultra low noise fans. the harddrive and the optical drives you will want to enclose in some kind of noise canceling mecanism, these are readily available at any computer hardware shop.
Forth you will want to look around for a good tv tuner card, since you will probably want to record some of the stuff you watch.
As the very last thing you should probably also buy the largest harddrive you can afford, since you probably will want to record in good quality and also save some copies of what ever movies you like on it for easy viewing.

Optional may be wireless so you dont have to use a ethernet cable and you could maybe use another more noisy mashine for storing movies on.

Hope this was somewhat helpfull :)

I definitely have to take that into consideration and I'm also wondering what software I should be using. The media center will be strictly for TV/Videos with light internet browsing for downloading episodes. Should I look into using Linux? are there any specialized apps for media centers? If you have one, whats yours setup like?

You could leave it on Windows for a Media Center, unless you want to spend extra time searching for Linux-compatible codecs.

linux compatible codecs... don't really know when I ever have had to even think about that. On windows I have had to download "mega-codec-pack" or something allong those lines almost every time I have wanted windows media player to play something other than the most basic microsoft format (of cause you can now adays just just vlc, but it actually does not decode many formats very well when you look closely at the technical quality)

Although Tegumi may have been meaning to mention drivers, in which case some higher end sound cards and video capture cards may be a bit more tricky when you want to find drivers.

I do not currently have a media center setup, but believe me I have serveral friends that take it *to* seriously with their setup. Once I have had a chance to talk to them after their vacation I will be able to recomend something less generic than a windows [xp/ vista/ 7] media center edition, which of cause would be the easies solution to pick, in terms of setup and drivers.

I have finally had the chance to discuss the options out there, in terms of media centers, with some friends.
Besides the obvious windows media center edition (which none of them were using) there are a number of FOSS alternatives: XBMC, Boxee, Elisa, Neuros OSD, Freevo, My Media System, Entertainer, CenterStage+Plex and MediaPortal. These are of cause only some of the alternatives, and they dont all work on both win/linux, and OS X (you never specified which OS would be targeted).
But getting back to the suggestion part, then it seems that XBMC is one of the best options available, offering lots of options to get it to work as you want, and it works on win/linux/OSX.

Good luck with the media center :)

Thanks jenslyn, I'll look into it =)

edit: this is what I found out:
XBMC says that mkv files are buggy and might be unsupported and because most of my files are mkvs - that's no good. Boxee is in the alpha stage and isn't quite finished yet. Elisa has a windows alternative called Moovida and it looks pretty good, but doesn't have DVR support. Neuros is a piece of hardware that connects to your TV and Network and is interfaced through that. The Neuros OSD is a recording solution and the Neuros LINK is the media center, which is being developed and costs a lot of money. Freevo is a media center/DVR all in one and seems to fit the bill but I'd have to learn how to install and use Linux. MMS is roughly about the same as Freevo, just a different look. Entertainer uses Gnome and XFCE and I have no idea how to use those either. Center Stage is for Mac and I'll probably never use it. MediaPortal is the same as Freevo and MMS but runs on windows. Looks kinda bland but it gets the job done.

So to conclude, when I finally move to a new place and get a big ass HDTV, I'll try MediaPortal and if I'm not satisfied I'd learn how to use Linux and try Freevo or MMS.

If your friends have any criticism on what I've wrote, please let me know. I just posted what I found from their sites.