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Hi there ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.
Welcome to my second blog post in which I am going to write down a semi-cheap HTPC system and talk a bit about it.
So what makes a good HTPC system?
-First of all you need to know that HTPC means home theater PC, or in other words a PC that is best suited for video or music playback.
HTPC's should be very quiet, you don't want listening to the PC louder than the movie obviously. It has to have large storage space to store a lot of video files and should be fast enough to be able to stream, decode, encode, transcode, etc... without hogging down the entire OS.
Now here are the components:
MOBO:ASRock 890GM PRO3 AM3 AMD 890GX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU:AMD Athlon II X4 645 Propus 3.1GHz
GPU:PowerColor SCS3 AX5750 1GBD5-S3DH Radeon HD 5750 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
RAM:G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3
HDD:Seagate Baracuda 2GB 7200rpm 6Gbps
PSU:OCZ Fatal1ty OCZ550FTY 550W ATX12V v2.2
Case:Thermaltake Black SECC Japanese steel LANBOX Lite
Total cost: $755 dollars
It lacks surround system, mouse, keyboard and DVD burner but those should be easy to pick and are based on user preference rather than performance or quality.
I didn't include an OS since a lot of people tend to use the "free" versions of media center or really free OS other than Microsoft's.
CPU: Its a cheap 4 core CPU that is best suited for this HTPC as its quite fast, has 4 cores which means you can stream with it and decoding and encoding is going to be pretty fast.
GPU: The graphic card is a Power Color 5750 with 1GB GDDR5 with a silent passive fan with great thermals and no noise.
HDD: Its got a very reliable 2TB hard disk, its a bit on the expensive side, but I think its well worth it.
PSU: One of the more reliable PSU's I can find. These days its really hard to find a reliable PSU that will last you for more than a year and this one had one of the best reviews out there.
Case: This is a great case for a HTPC system, one of the better ones out of all the cases and is actually bigger than a cigarette pack which I like as its very hard to set-up components in those very small cases. The only problem may be the PSU as I have not used this case and I am not 100% sure about its internal places and if it can fit a normal sized PSU.
Here is the newegg direct list:
 
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Seems pretty expensive for a "semi-cheap" htpc, this looks more like a high end htpc system to me. Hell this thing is probably better than a lot of gaming rigs that people are using to play sc2. $170 for a 2tb hd? You really don't need that much bandwidth to require a SATA3 hard drive, a SATA2 2tb hd would be almost as good for about half the price. GPU is way too strong, if all you're doing is watching 1080p movies then you can downgrade to a 5570 and that's still overkill. Likewise, the RAM you chose runs at 1600mhz when the performance increase you are going to get is sooo miniscule between 1600 and 1333. The power supply is just a waste for your build, there's no way your components are ever going to draw close to 550w. I would wager that a 400w PSU would handle that load fine and probably do it more efficiently than an 80 plus psu.
This is probably what I would build:
i3-550
ASRock H55 Micro ATX mobo
G-Skill 4GB DDR3 1333
WD Caviar Green 2TB HD
HIS 5570 Passively Cooled
Antec Micro ATX Case with 350W PSU
Subtotal: $509.94
This should be able to handle pretty much any 1080p playback. The performance of this rig will be pretty much on par with yours with the major difference being the dual vs quad. IMO an htpc doesn't really need a quad and would benefit more from a faster dual. Unless you're doing a lot of heavy encoding or other multithreaded tasks the dual would be better (and draw less power/create heat).
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I'm gonna go ahead and parrot what ZeaL. said.
For your media center, I would advise installing a lightweight linux distribution and using XBMC. I've used it a bit myself and I love it, it's very easy to use and you don't need to fiddle with codecs or anything.
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Also that gfx card is way overpowered. You really only need that if you want to play games. :O
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wow, that is very bad.
you just made some mid class PC without specific tuning towards a system you described.
1/5
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i am definitely +1 for using linux for htpc, i've used mythtv and that software is amazing, but also maybe a bit of overkill for alot of people. you can definitely get away with a geforce 7xxx series with hdmi, which is like around $50. the nvidia drivers for 7xxx have built in support for hd playback through x264. what this means is, you can watch hd video thats encoded in x264, with VERY LITTLE cpu being eaten up. you don't need a dual core+ processor to decode this video, because 90% decoding is done on the gpu itself. there is also a driver to do this under linux for these cards (vdpau). with this, i can run 720p video encoded in x264, with like 5-10% cpu usage on a pentium d 3.0 (this is an extremely lowend budget processor that retailed for about 50-70$ a pop 5 years ago)
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I can't justify an expensive Barracuda when the WD greens are so quiet/cheap/good overall.
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Well TeamLiquid is a gamers site, so I thought it should be able to handle games like Starcraft 2, mass effect 2, etc... and with good enough settings and resolutions.
As far as the price goes, well it just depends what you consider cheap I guess.
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EPT
