New budget HTPC build

[Tullux]

I was looking for a 'Mediaplayer' that could feed my new 1080p TFT with some High Definition content.
Unfortunately, the cheaper ones (<200 Euro) seem to be very limited on what they can play and pretty much none of them could play the native mpg2 (transport stream m2t) from my HD Camera.
The more expensive ones (like popcorn hour or Dvico Tvix HD) are nice little machines, but they're still lacking the flexibility of a decent PC - either no or very expensive WLan modules, no or just external (expensive) optical drive etc.

Fortunately, checking the market (and this board) a bit, I found that thanks to the new integrated chipsets from ATI and Nvidia, it would be very easy to build a budget PC with more than enough muscle and flexibility to serve as 'play all' Home Theater PC.

My choice of components (with some explanation why) - prices in Euro:

- CPU AMD ATHLON 64 X2 tray 4600+ EE 40,-
I could have gone with the cheaper (<30,-) Athlon64 LE or Sempron LE, but the Asus Manual recommends at least a x2 4400 for Blu-Ray playback, so I got the cheapest x2 my supplier had on stock.

- CPU-Cooler Scythe Ninja Mini 32,-
Brilliant little thing - using it in passive mode, thanks to the good airflow of the Case.

- 750 GB SAMSUNG SpinPoint F1 65,-
Probably one of the most silent HardDisks I ever used in a system (there might be better ones, but I never used them
Price/GB is amazing - performance is not extraordinary (the 320GB and 1TB Spinpoint F1 are top in the 7200rpm SATA segment), but the 80MB/s it manages is more than plenty. I was first thinking about using my old 250GB Samsung, but it's a lot louder and slower.

- 2x DDR2RAM 1GB DDR2-800 28,-
No-Name - cheapest I could get.

- ASUS M3N78-EMH HDMI nForce 780a 55,-
Actually my 2nd choice. I wanted to go for the popular (and much better equipped) Gigabyte 780G, but there are simply too many reports on driver issues with the ATI graphics card and I never want to go trough that again (I've been using Gigabyte boards in my last 3 systems and love them, but my old ATI 9800Pro gave me so much trouble, I'll not consider an ATI card again, until they deliver consitantly useable drivers).

- DVD 16X/52X LG GDR-H20N bulk 15,-
Cheap interim Solution to play DVDs and get some data into the PC, until Blu-Ray drops considreably in price.
I could have gone for a HD-DVD drive, but at ~50,- Euro that's an expensive interim solution - the selection of HD-DVD movies is fine, but no 'must haves' for me, so I'm holding out for a Blu-Ray drive.
At the moment ~100 Euro for the ROM and >300 for the Burner, which is pretty similar to the situation for the regular DVD at it's start - in a year or two - when there's more BR disks on the market, I can still upgrade (main advantage over regular Multimedia Players).


- Antec New Solution NSK2480 78,-
Got some good reviews and they where right.
Nice little case (actually not that 'little' - I need a new TV rack, since it's too deep to fit properly). Good airflow.
Good stock PSU and Fans (not the best on the market, but a decent supersilent PSU will cost more than the case) - from about 3,5 meter away, it blends with the backround noise, so for me it's silent enough with the stock equipment.
Only drawback is that there's no cover for the optical drives and the blue HD activity light is way too bright (the power-on light is greath, tough).


All in all 313,- + shipping


Added an old (like6-8 years old :/) Hauppauge WinTV PCI-FM card (still trying to get it to work with MediaPortal) for analogue cable (TV has built-in DVB-T and the cable is unused), WLan USB Stick and a cheap wireless (and rather crappy) keyboard.

Connected to the TV via HDMI (Picture&Sound).

Running on WinXP SP2 (I was considering Linux, but none of the Linux attempts I made in the last 15 years lasted more than a week, so I went for XP again).

All in all, I'm quite satisfied with the system. And as mentioned - it's really flexible. Should I switch to DVB-S, I can replace the tuner card, when Blu-Ray drives get cheaper, I can upgrade the optical drive, if there's a new 'codec du jour', I can just install it and the HTPC will play the video.

[dlisalde]

750 GB SAMSUNG SpinPoint F1 65

tullux i've this HD and is very silent.

I have payed 90€, and my WD 500GB 70€ in december 2007. Really cheap, enjoy!!!!

[Tullux]

I've got another F1 with 320GB (the one with one high density platter) for my main system.
It's performance is close to the excellent Velociraptor (~90mb/s read/write for the F1 vs. ~100mb/s for the velociraptor) and the price is amazing - cost me 40 Euro.

Seems like a very good choice for a budget HTPC as single disk or a very cheap, silent and performant RAID 0 setup.

Using that instead of the 750GB would put the price for above system <300 Euro, which is quite nice.

Edit: I have unplugged the Harddisk LED on the Antec - it's way too bright and with the HTPC just below the TV, it got annoying. One might consider not plugging it in from the start.

Still didn't manage to get the TV Card to work with mediaportal - went for Dscaler instead, which also offers nice tweaks to get the noisy analogue cable signal to a somewhat watcheable level.