The system is running on an AMD Duron 800MHz CPU and a ASUS VIA Chipset motherboard, with on-board video and sound. Yes, the 800MHz Duron is a huge overkill for the playback of mp3's, but with this system I was purchasing all new equipment with my lack of old computer parts on hand. The Duron range of processors are great performers, I was running one already in my home system and they are cheap to buy. I was looking at the older AMD K2/450MHz CPU's but the price difference between them and the Duron 800 was only $30 at the time, so it wasn't worth the small saving in cost for the AMD K2. On the plus side it helps shave a few seconds off bootup times and the extra grunt will prove useful if I decide to enhance the system for DivX/DVD movie playback in the future. 64MB of RAM is running in the system, again overkill, but will come in handy when I decide to enhance the system features.

The ASUS motherboard was chosen due to the good price and the fact that everything is on-board. It works fine, except sadly the onboard AC97 sound card proved to be a real problem due to the fact that PC speaker beeps are recreated through the sound card output, something I had never encountered in the past with on-board sound cards. I could have lived with this except the fact that the PC speaker output is about twice that of the windows/mp3/winamp output level....

..thus having all my pre-amp/amp levels set correctly for mp3's, then after rebooting I was greeted with a HUGE beep-beep-beep of the PC starting up, nearly blowing up my speakers and giving me a good shake too! Of course I very soon got rid of the on-board sound in place of a better sound card.

Storage is provided by a single 6.4GB IDE Samsung hard drive. This has been part of two mp3car systems and still is bad sector free, this includes getting what I think was condensation inside the drive one very cold night! The drive is mounted inside a removable hard drive bay for easy mp3 setup in my home pc. When the mp3car system is in position within the car the drive itself is mounted on its side to help avoid the drive heads hitting into the platters when the ride gets bumpy. I don't know how true this is, but it has worked well for over 1 year running like this so I am not one to argue.

The case for the system was custom made from plywood to keep it light and then carpeted to fit in with the rest of the hatchback area. It houses the CPU/motherboard, hard drive, removable hard drive bay, sound card and power supply. Certainly keeps the whole unit neat and easier to maintain and was worth the time it took to build.