Minimalistic HTPC for 1080p (2 Viewers)

[lubbe75]

Another day of research is over. Here is my list so far. Please give me some comments on whether you think it will work. It's the first time I build a computer and perhaps I have some compability issues here...

Case:
ANTEC NSK1380 MICRO-ATX 350W MICROTOWER

Motherboard:
GIGABYTE MA78GM-S2H HDMI SOCKET AM2+ M-ATX

CPU:
AMD PHENOM X3 8650 2.3GHZ SOCKET AM2+ BOX

CPU Fan:
Can I select an AM2 fan for an AM2+ processor? Any advice on popular brands and models?

Memory:
2 x DIMM DDR2 1GB PC2-6400 800MHZ CL5, KVR

Harddrive:
WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR BLUE 500GB SATA/300 16MB

Blu-ray:
Any blu-ray player that can also burn all DVD/CD formats. Any advice here? How do I connect both the Harddrive and the blu-ray to the motherboard? Specification says the motherboard has 5 internal S-ATA channels. Does it mean that I can connect 5 S-ATA "thingies"?

TV card:
One of the supported hybrid cards (DVB-T and analog). should it have onboard video encoding for the analog part? Any obvious suggestions here?

Thanks!

 

[bolders]

Hi Lubbe

Not sure if you realised but the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H is an AMD based board and not intel. I have one of these paired up with a 4450e (2.3GHz) CPU and it works great and has more than enough grunt to decode 1080p mkv files although the 4850e (2.5GHz) is probably better choice (didnt have one in stock when i ordered). However many have had problems with DXVA using this setup. I use CoreAVC which uses the CPU rather than the on board graphics so obviously I dont get this problem. I do use the integrated video to decode blu ray discs tho and it works great.

However If I was building today this would not be my choice of system. Nvidia have just released a new integrated board (which supports intel chips) and is supposed to be as good, if not better than, the AMD solution.

The chipsets are the 9300 and 9400. At present they are still fairly difficult to get hold of as they have only just been released but im sure that will change very soon. HD decode is supposed to be perfect and it also supports 8 channel LPCM which is very handy if you are connecting your system to a reciever and even more handy if you are using reclock as well (reclock drops audio packets when using ac3 and is speeding up/ slowing down frame rate - although this might have changed with the new releases but i havent had time to try it yet )

If you are interested here is a link to a review, also has some info on the 780g chipset which is used in the Gigabyte board you mentioned. ooh just remembered look at the power consumption figures - they are interesting

AnandTech: The IGP Chronicles Part 3: NVIDIA's GeForce 9300

Also if I were building now i would choose the the E5200 intel chip and not the E7200. It is about £30 cheaper than the E7200 and the only differences are that it has less cache and doesnt have the sse4 instruction set. I dont think either of these factors will affect the chips ability to playback 1080p content - especially considering that it is a faster chip than my 4450e which does the job nicely. Furthermore the E5200 is built on a 45nm process and runs at 2.53GHz which is identical to the E7200.

bolders

 

[Lucky_JL]

No, I haven't looked at that. Wouldn't you say that they are too small (too warm) to play 1080, blu-ray and have enough space for TV-card etc?
Again, if there is a description for a working mini-itx project then I am interested.

You can find some mini-itx projects here in MediaPortal forum, and i can talk a little bit about my requirements and my research results so far
Like any other people i want a HTPC that is small ( aka mini-itx ), quiet ( aka fanless ) and lowpower ( a small energy bill and a easiest to cooler )


So at the moment my "Ultimate MiniITX HTPC" is composed by:

CASE : HFX Micro M2 Black
CPU : AMD Athlon X2 4850e
BOARD : J&W MINIX™ 780G-SP128MB
MEM : OCZ PC2-6400 DDR2 SODIMM
HDD : Western Digital Scorpio Blue
TV : Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2200
​

My plan is get a passive cooling system for the CPU ( look at BorgFX ), use a passive PSU ( look at EF14 ) and some HD Silencers. At the moment i will go to a Sony Slim DVD and one or two Western Digital HDD ( i am considering 1x 320GB cenario against a 1x160GB+1x320GB cenario where the 160GB drive will have the operative system, MP TV Server and all p2p downloads leaving the 320GB drive the function of multimedia warehouse ).

The board supports DVXA through 780G chipset ( i plan to go with the software combo MP+VISTA ), and i will use that for all the HD ( 1080p, 720p ) sources that have been encoded with the right profile ( L4.1 ), when some file cannot be processed by the GPU the system will have enough horsepower to decode the file by software.

I will go for 4GB RAM ( i know that 2 is enough, the other 2 is for use as RAMDisk on MP TV Server ) and will underclock/undervolt the CPU to run at 1.5GHZ ( less energy, less heat, less pression on cooling system ).

At last i needed some PCI-e TV Card, since in my country we will have TDT in some years and i want to be able to record 1 channel and keep watching other channel, after check to see if MP support for the the card was good i choose the Hauppauge HVR-2200 ( we can get lot of info for this card in Australian websites )



At this moment my main concern is with the Case and the Cpu cooler, because its not clear that the Cpu cooler is supported in the Micro Case ( the call them "micro" mas it only supports mini-itx boards )


All ideias and comments are welcome!
Since i start to do research my "target system" had change a lot ...
lol


Best Regards,

 

[lubbe75]

bolders, the Intel based motherboard that you mention sounds interesting, but as you said it still seems to be rare on the market. If it doesn't appear soon I will probably still go with the AMD solution. Also, I have heard that AMD processors give you more for the money in the lower ranges. Is there any difference in how much heat they generate for the same performance?

Lucky_JL, that's a neat little box. Very attractive. Still, I think I will go ahead with the micro-atx. I recon that I might want to upgrade in the future with more things in the box, such as more than one TV-card, a real graphics card, wifi and other things. With a mini-itx case it seems very difficult, if not impossible, to squeeze in so many things and still keep it cool.

By the way, this underclocking/underpowering thing that you talk about, is that a hardware tweak, or is it possible to do it automatically, "gearing down" to lower consumption and frequencies when there is no demand for 100%?

And RAM-disk in MediaPortal? Can I read about that feature somewhere? My guess is that it's a setting to let MediaPortal occupy x Gb for itself, but what are the benefits? I haven't really found anything about that feature so far.

 

[Lucky_JL]

lubbe75

Lucky_JL, that's a neat little box. Very attractive. Still, I think I will go ahead with the micro-atx. I recon that I might want to upgrade in the future with more things in the box, such as more than one TV-card, a real graphics card, wifi and other things. With a mini-itx case it seems very difficult, if not impossible, to squeeze in so many things and still keep it cool.

Thanks

I understand you scenario and at this point i think that the option for a passive cooling system will force me into MicroATX size ( more on that here )

Anyway i can argue that 1 TV Card is enough ( you have TV Cards with 4 or more tunners ), a real graphic card will be to much horse power ( you probably will need more powerfull PSU, and will have more heat to cool ), a wifi card can alwys be replaced by some USB Wifi Adaptor or something like a FON Router running as Wifi Client connected to the onboard LAN connector

By the way, this underclocking/underpowering thing that you talk about, is that a hardware tweak, or is it possible to do it automatically, "gearing down" to lower consumption and frequencies when there is no demand for 100%?

You can change the settings on BIOS, or using software like RMClock

And RAM-disk in MediaPortal? Can I read about that feature somewhere? My guess is that it's a setting to let MediaPortal occupy x Gb for itself, but what are the benefits? I haven't really found anything about that feature so far.

You can check the RamDisk info at the MediaPortal wiki



Best Regards,
Lucky_JL

 

[lubbe75]

Ok, the latest plan looks like this. I realise that I am kind of deviating from my own topic of building a minimalistic HTPC. Sorry for that. Let me know if you think I should begin a new thread instead. Reading discussions on multiple tuners and recordings I am now selecting a 4x phenom processor instead of 3x. I am also selecting 4 x 1 Gb of ram instead of 2 x as I realise a Ram-disk might be a good idea:

Case:
ANTEC NSK1380 MICRO-ATX 350W MICROTOWER

Motherboard:
GIGABYTE MA78GM-S2H HDMI SOCKET AM2+ M-ATX

CPU:
AMD PHENOM X4 9650 2.3GHZ SOCKET AM2+

Memory:
4 x DIMM DDR2 1GB PC2-6400 800MHZ CL5, KVR

Harddrive:
WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR BLUE 500GB SATA/300 16MB


Now do you think this is realistic, or will this setup be way too hot and noisy for an HTPC?

As for CPU fan I still don't know what to choose. Can someone give me a tip? Will any AM2 fan also fit on an AM2+ processor like Phenom?

As for optical unit I think I will just choose a regular DVD burner instead of Blu-ray for now. They are so much cheaper and I don't see myself buying blu-ray disks in the near future. Can I choose any burner here or are there some that I should avoid due to noise? Do they all have the same interface for motherboard connections or is it possible to make a choice that doesn't work with the motherboard that I am aiming for?

Thanks again.

 

[Lucky_JL]

Now do you think this is realistic, or will this setup be way too hot and noisy for an HTPC?

As for CPU fan I still don't know what to choose. Can someone give me a tip? Will any AM2 fan also fit on an AM2+ processor like Phenom?

As for optical unit I think I will just choose a regular DVD burner instead of Blu-ray for now. They are so much cheaper and I don't see myself buying blu-ray disks in the near future. Can I choose any burner here or are there some that I should avoid due to noise? Do they all have the same interface for motherboard connections or is it possible to make a choice that doesn't work with the motherboard that I am aiming for?

Thanks again.

Fans i can't help you because i am going passive all the way , but lots of people are using Noctua fans,
CPU i will go for 4850e, since its enough for 1080p decode and i relly don't need more power,
I will also go with DVD drive, when BlueRay drive become more cheap then *maybe* i change ...


Regards,
Lucky_JL

 

[revs]

Take a look at CPU fans from Arctic Cooling. The one I have is superb, and very very quiet. For other fans, look at a Noctua. Dont over-do the fans. Also - make sure they all fit in your case!

 

[lubbe75]

Finally, I think I have a plan for a working system here...

Case:
ANTEC NSK1380 MICRO-ATX 350W MICROTOWER

Motherboard:
GIGABYTE MA78GM-S2H HDMI SOCKET AM2+ M-ATX

CPU:
AMD PHENOM X3 8450 2.1GHZ SOCKET AM2+

Memory:
4 x DIMM DDR2 1GB PC2-6400 800MHZ CL5, KVR

Harddrive:
WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR BLUE 500GB SATA/300 16MB

TV card:
HAUPPAUGE WINTV HVR-1300T PCI

In the end I went back to a X3 Phenom (2.1GHz). Perhaps slightly cooler than a X4 and probably fast enough for what I need. For now I will settle with an old usb DVD-writer, and I might install a blu-ray in the future. As for CPU fan I will try with the one included first.

So, calculating it looks like I will end up spending about 5000 Kr (wich is about €500 with today's instabile currencies). Time to bring this list around to local dealers and see whether I can get an even better deal somewhere.

Please, let me know if you find any flaw in this setup, or some other poor or unlogical choice. Thanks!

 

[lubbe75]

Alright, correcting myself I don't see any reason to buy 4 x 1Gb instead of 2 x 2Gb. I will order it tomorrow.