Possible HTPC build - Some questions

[marksasmadasafish]

I'm in the process of upgrading my main PC to a dual core system and will have a load of parts left over which i thougt I could use to build a HTPC with mediaportal.

The parts including the following...

AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Abit NF7 V2.0
Zalman CPU Cooler
2GB of DDR 400 RAM
200GB IDE Seagate Baracuda 7200.7
120GB IDE Seagate Baracuda 7200.7
120GB IDE Seagate Baracuda 7200.7
IBM PCI RAID Card (Raid 1/0)
PNY Geforce 6600GT 128MB
Soundblaster 5.1 Live! Player

So my Questions are...

1. I'm going to output the HTPC through my Teac surround sound amp (both Video and Audio) - Is it best to use the Soundblaster for sound or use the motherboards onboard SPDIF?

2. I was planning to use the 200GB harddrive for OS, apps and MP3. I was then going to use the 2 120GB drives in a Raid 0 Array for video recordings. Is this best or would it be better to have the 2 drives seperate and set each TV card to one of the drives? (I'm planning to get 2 Digital (Terestrial) TV Cards)

3. Which Digital TV cards would you recommend? I'm in North London, UK if that makes any difference.

4. Any problems with having no DVD drive in the long term? I wasn't going to bother with a CD/DVD as I will use my Teac DVD drive to watch DVDs and use my desktop to Rip CDs DVDs etc as it will be faster and then copy it over my wired network.

5. Any Suggestions for a suitable case?

6. Do computer remote controls use standard IR setting or do they have special codes? I have a touch screen programmable remote control for my Amp and plan to use this to control the HTPC . The reason i asl is my NTL Cable TV box has special codes that the remote cant replicate.

7. In addition the the 2 Freeview Tv cards which card should I get to connect to my cable TV box (its a Samsung NTL box) and has anyone found a way of controlling NTL STB through a HTPC?

Thanks

Mark

[cleao]

My sugestion (based on facts):

1. Is the same using Soundblaster for sound or use the motherboards onboard SPDIF, because the best way it's pass-trough the sound chip and use SPDIF. Don't waste money in Soundblaster!

2. Have the 2 drives seperate depend on the system use, I think RAID is better and you have just one drive to admin. I sugest you to put OS in one drive and all the data in another - in future you can re-instal OS or any program including MP.

3. In London? Don't know!

4. It's good to have a DVD writer, if you plan to use network it must be a gigabite, if not copy data before launch and after it the big files are there!

5. http://www.silverstonetek.com/products-lc18.htm, http://www.origenae.com/product_x15e.htm


:wink:
C. L.

[NLS]

1. if your motherboard has SPDIF, it means it already has an audiocard 1000 times better than your soundblaster - dump the soundblaster

2. if you can/want to use all three hard disks, use RAID0 with the 120 and use it for recordings only and the 200 for the rest data/system/pagefile... if you ask what *I* would do though, I would use them all JBOD (and have a nice 440GB disk)... (if the controller allows for that)

3. erm... whatever

4. what problems... if you don't miss it, you know better than us... now if your LAN is gigabit, even better

5. the one you will like when you see it - I prefer cases that look like decks and have VFD screen - I am also supporter of cases that fit FULL ATX motherboards in them

6. if it is a learning remote, why would you care about the codes? and do you have an IR receiver for the PC? all IR receiver software on PC is also learning (so both sides are learning, so there shouldn't be a problem)

7. -

[marksasmadasafish]

Thanks for the replys

@cleao

1. I all ready have the soundblaster. Just wondering if there were any benefits to having the PCI card rather than onboard. I couldn't think of any but that didnt mean there weren't any

2. I would partition the 200gb drive anyway so reinstalls wouldnt be a problem even with the music etc on the drive.

3. Doesn't have to be london just added for completeness. Just looking for what cards people are using.


@NLS

1. Thats what I thought - just checking

2. Interesting point but JBOD doesn't offer any performance benefits does it? What I was really getting at was is RAID 0 nessecary/nice to have for performance reasons (as I have the controller anyway). Not sure it does JOB anyway - haven't tried it yet.

4. I could not think of any issues (I have 2 other machines with out optical drives) but didnot know id Mediaportal need a drive for any reason.

5. hmm. I was looking for some suggetions i.e. this is the case I use, its good/bad because. The case would have to Full ATX as its a ATX motherboard I'm going to use.

6. My point was do they use any special IR protocols. If they are both learing then thats fine Just checking I dont end up with another remote I cant use with my "learning" remote control.

Mark

[markr]

Mark

1. no contest, use SPDif and a hifi decoder rather than any PC based option. if you can enable the stereo jacks at the same time you can wire them into the SCART connector on your TV - meaning that you can listed to HTPC sourced data without having to enable the full surround sound/home cinema equipment.

2. RAID 0 is a BAD idea. whilst it makes the performance better, it doubles the chance of you suffering from a disk fault and unlike RAID 1 provides no protection against data loss. IDE and SATA disks are not designed for continual use like in a HTPC (that's one of the reasons to pay more for high rpm scsi or fc disks in servers - it's also why server have RAID controllers and use RAID 1 and 5). Use RAID 1 on the two 120's and put any important data on there (stuff that doesn't change much - OS and MP3's) use the 200GB disk as video tape for recordings.

as an asside - buy some extra RAM - that'll fix any issues with writing data onto the relatively slow disks.

3. Anything on the supported list. However if you are in a freeview area then there is little point in getting hybrid or analogue circitry on the cards. Digital transmisions provide much lower CPU utilisation than capturing analogue (or any external source) videa streams, also there is no degredation between live and recorded. (I bought hybrid cards only to never use the analogue portion of the cards).

4. this saves £20 - I'd add one as they are so cheap, bear in mind that a decent setup HTPC can drive high end HD display's (up to and including the mythical 1080p resolution that no-one intends to transmit - but I've found one manfacturer has released a display that supports it, it's £6Grand so I'll wait) and that a PC can do upscaling with all that spare horsepower it has. It should therefore be possible to get a better image from the HTPC than from your TEAC DVD PLayer. Riping CD's takes less time than playing them and can be automated (when you insert an new CD it just does it) if you have a large CD collection you'll get bored riping them by hand.

5. I made the mistake of buying a small low profile case. None of the capture cards I've found come with low profile PCI brackets - even those that are actually low profile designs. also making the thing quiet is important and small low profile cases are stupidly expensive. The case also doesn't fit on top of, or underneath any full size HiFi you might have (it's too deep and too narrow !). I am therefore about to invest in one of the Silverstonetek cases (probably an LC10M I like uncluttered HiFi, the LC18 someone suggested has a built in screen making it bright and a distraction when watching a movie - and really expensive)

6. Many of them are learning remotes - and the codes they use can normally be recreated by a 3rd party learning remote - however an HTPC remote will often have extra buttons that are not on normal HiFi related. Also if you buy a Silverstone case with a VFD (led front panel - so you can make the thing display track numbers and so on like proper HiFi) they come with a suitable remote. I have an NTL cable box (silver Samsung one) and control that through the HTPC (see the answer you your last question)

7. However either buy a cheap analogue card to capture the NTL video, or buy a video card that can also capture video (like some Nvidia cards with VIVO function) set ths card up with the lowest record priority due to the CPU overhead and lower quality of the captured video (you'll be capturing SVideo signals at best)

and buy an IR Blaster - I bought a Microsoft MCE remote control from ebay for £25 - which is one of the cheaper ways to get an IR Blaster (it comes with 2 ir buds to control 2 external STB's or other devices). then you tell the HTPC you want to watch something on NTL - it changes the channel and you watch through the HTPC. one remote (the HTPC one) and all the benefits of timshifting etc that you built the HTPC for in the first place.

also a couple of other suggestions.
1) buy a passive (if you can find one) heatsink for the CPU - or at least the quietest one you can find.
2) buy a quiet PSU, and you shouldn't need a huge one. We measured my friends HPTC (300GB SATAII disk, DVDRW drive, Athlon 64 @ 3Ghz, 512MB RAM, Haupage HVR1100 and an NVidia 6200) and it only draws 72 - 80W when running and only 110 during bootup. My system (Sempron 2600, 512MB RAM, 300GB SATAII disk, Nvidia 6200 DVDRW disk Avermedia A16AR) is happily running of a 220W PSU (havent got round to measuring it yet)
3) fit the largest diameter fans running at the lowest speed you can manage to cool the case and the system. Noise in your living room will drive you nuts eventually if you don't. I ended up rewiring all the fans in the case I started with to run on 7Volts instead of 12 (connected across +12 and +5 from the PSU) - dropping the speed massively, unfortunately they don't shift enough air at 5Volts (when they are nearly silent) to cool the system, meaning that I have to live with a constant noise. A larger case, with large diameter slow reving fans will be much quieter (hence the LC10M).
4) I am also likely to buy a dual core mobile CPU based mother board (at some time soon - they are a bit pricey at present) - they use the least power, and are therefore the coolest (making it easier to run with a passive heatsink). capturing a terestial digital channel requires little CPU power - but dual cores means I can leave one recompressing recordings without affecting the use of the system.

that last comment in conjunction with the lack of low profile capture cards means I am about to rebuild my HTPC into a bigger box (so I can sit it under my amp!) - spending more money replacing parts I've already purchased, hopefuly you can avoid that.

Hope this helps

good Luck

Mark

P.S. - all the above is highly opinionated but based on the 3 builds it has taken me to get the HTPC I really wanted in the first place !

P.P.S - and MediaPortal is by far the best app, the only other contestent is MythTV - and my Linux skills are hugely lacking to get that working at all.

[Spragleknas]

AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Abit NF7 V2.0
Zalman CPU Cooler
2GB of DDR 400 RAM
200GB IDE Seagate Baracuda 7200.7
120GB IDE Seagate Baracuda 7200.7
120GB IDE Seagate Baracuda 7200.7
IBM PCI RAID Card (Raid 1/0)
PNY Geforce 6600GT 128MB
Soundblaster 5.1 Live! Player

Don't care what some ppl here say; YOU DO NEED A DECENT PSU FOR THIS RIG!

[markr]

looking at the hw list you propose reusing, you have a lot more components than the systems I measured the power consumption on

each hd will draw something like 20W
the 6600GT will draw more than either graphics card I used
not sure about the IBM RAID card - there are so many versions of this I can't work out which one you have - some have their own CPU's, RAM and batteries, some are just an add on processor and RAM that reuse an on board Adaptec or LSI SCSI controller

but as is pointed out - you are still going to end up with a power draw in excess of 150W with your HW and the most important thing to remember is that the PSU needs to supply enough current on EACH voltage for your power draw - not just a total Wattage, There are several discussion on this in the forums around, Also it's not the running current that is the problem so much as the startup current starting 3 motors (in the drives) and all the fans at once will likely pull a significant spike of current (that's why the big storage vendors start drives a few at a time under the control of a dedicated processor instead of all at once)

Also I've seen various comments saying that higher powered silent PSU's running well within their ratings are able to run cooler and quieter than smaller PSU's running closer to their maximum ratings.

Regards

Mark

[urev]

Originally Posted by marksasmadasafish

2. I was planning to use the 200GB harddrive for OS, apps and MP3. I was then going to use the 2 120GB drives in a Raid 0 Array for video recordings. Is this best or would it be better to have the 2 drives seperate and set each TV card to one of the drives? (I'm planning to get 2 Digital (Terestrial) TV Cards)

Hi!
I also have two tv-cards writing to one partition. I observed that this partition gets very defragmented in a short time. I think two partitions for each card should be better - but I haven't tried it out.
Anyone else?

bye, urev

[NLS]

you mean fragmented

and yes this is very probable esp. if you write at the SAME time

[urev]

Originally Posted by NLS

you mean fragmented

oh, yes, sorry, of course.
Do you have any suggestions how to avoid fragmentation? (apart from using two partitions with the problem, that one partition is full and the other empty)

bye, urev