Low Cost HTPC (1080P)

[outlive]

I'm building a HTPC for under 350€
i'm strictly going for low noise/heat with a maximum of performance and minimum price

The Hardware



Case - SilverStone Milo ML01 black
a quality mATX Case, 10cm high, low profile, all ALU-Case with a 300W Power Supply (250W effective)
has a build in 32:1 Card Reader




Harddisc - Western Digital Caviar GP 500GB SATA II (WD5000AACS)
This HD has the lowest noise/energy consumption in it's class (3.5")
if you want a HDD that produces even less noise you have to loock at 2.5" drives,
which have a higher in cost/performance ratio




CPU - AMD Sempron 64 LE-1100 AM2
out of the box with 1.90GHz this cpu will be extremly undervolted/underclocked
and will be cooled be passivly cooled for 90% of it's time and should heat be a problem
a 92cm fan will be activated - which brings us to the cpu fan:




CPU Cooler - Scythe Shuriken
large but low profile AL/CU cooler with nice heatpipe layout
the fan will be controlled via mainboard/software




Memory - Aeneon DIMM 1024MB PC2-6400U CL5 (DDR2-800)
i could have gone for just 512MB (which is more then enough for media decoding in an HTPC)
but i took 1GB because the price was the same




Mainboard - Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
This mainboard is the heart and king of integrated technology
with an onboard ATi HD 3200 this ****** has more then enough power to decode 1080P on the fly
with minimal use of the cpu (that's why the Sempron gets underclocked)
Top that with a 7.1 sound chip (ALC889A), Gb LAN, HDMI, DVI-D, VGA and FireWire and you got all you need.




DVD-RW Drive - LG GSA-4163B
older but still excellent drive i have laying around, will be reduced to 1xSpeed while playing DVD's
for low noise profile and can be dynamically switched to full speed when ripping stuff

[bigj]

Let us all know how the Gigabyte780G board works out with onboard GPU.
Do you have costings yet for these components?

Harddisk - is that disk quiet - I think the samsung spinpoints might be quieter.

CPU cooling - you might want to use speedfan to control the fan speed and amd cpu speed control too. I found that works well as you can fully control the CPU speed in software and also have the fan spin up if it is really needed.

[kszabo]

consider buying 2 GB RAM in dual channel config. Maybe you will need Vista (because of newer ATi drivers, EVR etc), and it needs dual channel. Don`t forget that the onboard HD3200 needs shared memory from RAM.

Where is yout TV-Card?

[outlive]

@bigji
the mainboard costs around 80€ and will be available at retailers tomorrow (18.02.08)

this harddisc is the most quietest there is at the moment - the new Green Power (GP) technology from western digital is an amazing piece of acoustics management.
in every test i have read - this harddisc is the most quietest, coolest and least power consuming harddisc they tested so far

i like spinpoints too - i got one in my gaming pc - but they are still too loud for my taste

@kszabo
i have 2GB of ram (2x1GB in dual channel config) in my work rig and as a graphic artist working in the game industry, the only time i get somewhat close to use all of it is with large scale multilayer textures open in photoshop and maya at the same time...so 2GB of Ram is just wasted in a HTPC, that does just HDTV decoding

the operating system is an heavily optimized and neatly cut (nlite) XP Pro with minimal memory-footprint and excellent response times
i used vista at work (graphics) for the last 6 months and honestly - vista is slow and bugged, in fact it's so bad we did a XP Pro downgrade on our vistamachines at work last week


no tv-card at the moment (i use a digital sat-receiver for that), because there are currently no interesting HDTV channels on european satellites and their number is really really limited too - so this will be an optional component at a later time

[kszabo]

agree - with XP you don´t need 2GB, even with onboard graphics. But I wish 4 GB for me, from this I could use 2 GB as RAM-Disk for Timeshifting, without Harddrive usage (Noise, fragmentation etc). Solide state discs are too expensive still.

But the predecessor of the 780G (the 690G/x1250) has serious driver issues with XP, which are still not solved after months.
ATI 690G/x1250 problems

I own one and this made me switch from XP to Vista. It would not surprise me if your new 780G will have same problems... And the release of this chipset is postponed already because of driver issues... I wish you good luck. If you have good luck, I will do a MoBo upgrade to 790G myself also (and XP downgrade at the same time?).

Don´t underestimate the improvements of Vista against XP in Multimediasupport.
There are reports that HD-Playback works optimal only with Vista (mainly because of EVR with DXVA 2.0 support). Under XP EVR with DXVA 2.0 is not possible. I could not get 1080i HDTV playback fluid with XP, but very easily with Vista.

[lillerik]

This look interesting. If it works then we could build really cheap 1080p htpcs good luck to you!

[outlive]

setting a ram-disc for tempdata is a neat idea, not thought of that yet!
when i upgrade a tv-card, this will definitly be an option when upgrade memory too (but until then )

sounds like a nasty problem in the newer xp catalyst drivers with the 690G - why didn't you just downgraded to 7.10, as everybody is reporting the issue is resolved with it ?

for HD playback i'm using CoreAVC H.264 Video Codec Professional, no problem with 1080P/i playback here (and XP)

[Eabin]

hm, how many shader processors does this onboard thingy have? because i very much doubt that you will be able to play back 1080i content on a single core processor without heavily compromising quality.

to get good deinterlacing, you will either need lots of shader-power and VA-deinterlacing from the ATI chip, or you are lucky and have a good TV-display with e.g. a faroudja deinterlacer.

you should be fine for blue-ray, however.

[takagari]

this is nice, but sinc ei have case, hard drives already i really jus tneed mobo+ram+cpu and cooler
This isnt bad but I think I would prefer a dual core so I can do pvr, and eventually dual pvr when I see fit.

[Krisso]

so, you set it all up? does it work flawlessly with 1080p material? pictures!!