$1100 CAD budget - what to buy?

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WCES Ryan

Gawd
Joined
Mar 28, 2005
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So I finally have the money saved for my new HTPC, but I am still on the fence as to what to buy. I have a basic idea, but still haven't decided on anything.

I do have some parts that are going to be salvaged from my current desktop, those being 2 tuner cards and a few hard drives.

I need CPU, mobo, RAM, PSU, system drive, another large hard drive, video card, case and optical drive.

What does [H] recommend?
 
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=25517&vpn=SCMNJ-1000&manufacture=Scythe
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=28829&vpn=GA-MA78GM-S2H&manufacture=Gigabyte
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18495&vpn=OCZ2G8002GK&manufacture=OCZ Technology
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=22437&vpn=66I-00715&manufacture=Microsoft
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=24893&vpn=ADH2350DDBOX&manufacture=AMD
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18897&vpn=FUSION 430&manufacture=ANTEC
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30203&vpn=BC-1205PT&manufacture=ASUS
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18413&vpn=ST3500630AS&manufacture=Seagate

Not sure where we're at cost wise but thats an excellent starting point; DVD drives are pretty much the same across the board so drop the BR drive for one is very easy.
 
Almost everything Criminal posted, cept i would go for the black fusion case. After rebates the cost from the above comes to 776.71 (unless i calc'd it wrong), so depending on how much of a media hog you are perhaps a higher capacity HD.
 
I am definitely a media hog so I'm not sure that the case will work. I really like the looks of the SIlverstone Lascala LC17B. I believe I'm going to be stuffing 5 hard drives (2x1TB, 2x500gb, system drive) in there from the get go, so lots of room is a big thing for me.
 
I would wait till next month to get the new Intel G45 board. Grab the cheapest Core 2 Duo you can find, 2 gb of ram, whichever case you like, a low wattage PSU, probably a 400w or lower Enermax liberty as it's modular and you won't need very many cables.

Board has video and audio on it so no need for add on cards. It will give you HDMI 1.3, 7.1 over HDMI LCPM(waiting to find out about bitstream) and run cool and use little power.
 
WCES Ryan said:
I am definitely a media hog so I'm not sure that the case will work. I really like the looks of the SIlverstone Lascala LC17B. I believe I'm going to be stuffing 5 hard drives (2x1TB, 2x500gb, system drive) in there from the get go, so lots of room is a big thing for me.
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If your stuff that many HDDs into the case then you seriously need to build a media server instead. Seriously, right now I use my HTPC the way you are proposing (media server went down and haven't been able to replace the dead mobo) and it's a huge pain in the ass as well as a serious hit to the WAF. Using an HTPC like this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen anyone do with one.
Archer75 said:
I would wait till next month to get the new Intel G45 board. Grab the cheapest Core 2 Duo you can find, 2 gb of ram, whichever case you like, a low wattage PSU, probably a 400w or lower Enermax liberty as it's modular and you won't need very many cables.

Board has video and audio on it so no need for add on cards. It will give you HDMI 1.3, 7.1 over HDMI LCPM(waiting to find out about bitstream) and run cool and use little power.
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Hopefully by the time of release Intel will have worked out the bugs that remain in the G45; last time they showed it off (IDF I think it was) G45 wasn't able to playback a Blu Ray without serious stutter at 1080p; 720p material was easy.

Then theres the issue of Intel's IGPs still scoring massively lower then AMD or NV's IGPs when it comes to image quality and drivers; G33 was a clusterfuck when it came to HD material and the G35 was marginally better.

So yeah, if Intel can get their crap together and build a solid HTPC usable IGP with the G45 then I'd be all over that like a hungry fat kid in a candy store but Intel's last efforts haven't inspired much confidence.
 
I don't store a single movie on my HTPC. I have a seperate WHS box and store all my movies on it(over 170 now)


CrimandEvil said:
Hopefully by the time of release Intel will have worked out the bugs that remain in the G45; last time they showed it off (IDF I think it was) G45 wasn't able to playback a Blu Ray without serious stutter at 1080p; 720p material was easy.

Then theres the issue of Intel's IGPs still scoring massively lower then AMD or NV's IGPs when it comes to image quality and drivers; G33 was a clusterfuck when it came to HD material and the G35 was marginally better.

So yeah, if Intel can get their crap together and build a solid HTPC usable IGP with the G45 then I'd be all over that like a hungry fat kid in a candy store but Intel's last efforts haven't inspired much confidence.
Click to expand...

What intel showed off wasen't the final chip. There was a known issue with that chip thus delaying the launch until next month. It's all been worked out in a new revision of the chip. They new this way back when but it just takes time to get new chips made.
The G33 or G35 was never a serious contender in the HTPC market. The G35 couldn't offloading AVC video which is what is played mostly in terms of hi def. Though most people over at avsforums.com enjoy the G35.

The geforce 8200 board is nice as it does HD offloading onboard along with 7.1 LCPM over HDMI. However it seems to be hit or miss with actually getting 7.1 out of it. And you need to pair it with a Phenom or you get stutters(as reported by other users). AMD says the Phenom is needed for advanced deinterlacing or some such crap.
 
So what would your recommendation be then? I do have a desktop that I can use to store drives in, and it's pretty much available to be used as whatever I like. What would you buy in terms of hardware, and how would you configure the two machines to work together?
 
WCES Ryan said:
So what would your recommendation be then? I do have a desktop that I can use to store drives in, and it's pretty much available to be used as whatever I like. What would you buy in terms of hardware, and how would you configure the two machines to work together?
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There is no magical configuration for the computers to talk, it's just standard networking. The only real configuration comes in how you want to setup your drives. You can leave them as stand alone or do some kind of raid or a JBOD. It all depends on what drives you have available to use, how many SATA or IDE ports you have available. And if you don't have enough then you'll need to buy a card of some sort.
 
Archer75 said:
There is no magical configuration for the computers to talk, it's just standard networking. The only real configuration comes in how you want to setup your drives. You can leave them as stand alone or do some kind of raid or a JBOD. It all depends on what drives you have available to use, how many SATA or IDE ports you have available. And if you don't have enough then you'll need to buy a card of some sort.
Click to expand...

With that said, WHS was a breeze to use with my HTPC. I just wish that MS would either drop the price or improve it to support VMC.
 
CrimandEvil said:
With that said, WHS was a breeze to use with my HTPC. I just wish that MS would either drop the price or improve it to support VMC.
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I use VMC on my HTPC and have a WHS box. Works fine. What particular issue are you having?
 
Basically all you are suggesting then is to keep my drives in another box and sharing them on the network? Easy enough, I've actually thought about doing that already.

As far as networking it, would it be possible to bridge the two connections, ie: run an ethernet cable between the server and the HTPC to take advantage of the gigabit connection, and have the server share it's network connection with the HTPC? Does that even make sense?

Of course, I don't know if in your suggesting that, if you were assuming that the server was going to be in a different room. Unfortunately I don't have the space for that, so no matter what, the drives will be sitting in the same room, just a few feet from the server. Would there still be any benefit to going the WHS route?
 
WCES Ryan said:
As far as networking it, would it be possible to bridge the two connections, ie: run an ethernet cable between the server and the HTPC to take advantage of the gigabit connection, and have the server share it's network connection with the HTPC? Does that even make sense?
Click to expand...

I would just use a hub or router to share the connection. I'm sure you can do a direct connection if you have 2 NIC in your server but I haven't done this.
My house is wired with ethernet so my HTPC is downstairs and goes through 2 hubs before it reaches my router that is connected to my server.

WCES Ryan said:
Would there still be any benefit to going the WHS route?
Click to expand...

The benefit to WHS is that your drives don't have to all be the same size as they do in RAID to get all the space on them. You can add and remove drives very easily to a single storage pool. That way you don't have to have some movies on Drive 1 and some on Drive 2 and some on Drive 3. It will be one storage pool. And if you turn on duplication the server will maintain 2 copies of your files in that share on 2 different drives. So if one drive fails you still have a backup.
 
Archer75 said:
I would just use a hub or router to share the connection. I'm sure you can do a direct connection if you have 2 NIC in your server but I haven't done this.
My house is wired with ethernet so my HTPC is downstairs and goes through 2 hubs before it reaches my router that is connected to my server.



The benefit to WHS is that your drives don't have to all be the same size as they do in RAID to get all the space on them. You can add and remove drives very easily to a single storage pool. That way you don't have to have some movies on Drive 1 and some on Drive 2 and some on Drive 3. It will be one storage pool. And if you turn on duplication the server will maintain 2 copies of your files in that share on 2 different drives. So if one drive fails you still have a backup.
Click to expand...
The box that will be acting as my server if I go that route has dual gig ethernet ports, so it would be nice to take advantage of that to move data between it and the HTPC. Otherwise, my router is only 100mb and it already sees a ton of traffic as it is. It seems like it would be the more efficient option if I can set it up.

And that's interesting... I haven't researched WHS, that's a VERY appealing feature that I've never heard of. I don't suppose that I can add network shares to that storage pool, can I? That alone might be worth going that route, right now I have everything on 4 seperate drives (2 standalone and 2 in RAID-0), and I just mounted 2 of the drives in the root of the other drive. Cool!
 
WCES Ryan said:
The box that will be acting as my server if I go that route has dual gig ethernet ports, so it would be nice to take advantage of that to move data between it and the HTPC. Otherwise, my router is only 100mb and it already sees a ton of traffic as it is. It seems like it would be the more efficient option if I can set it up.

And that's interesting... I haven't researched WHS, that's a VERY appealing feature that I've never heard of. I don't suppose that I can add network shares to that storage pool, can I? That alone might be worth going that route, right now I have everything on 4 seperate drives (2 standalone and 2 in RAID-0), and I just mounted 2 of the drives in the root of the other drive. Cool!
Click to expand...

Your router is more than fast enough for HD video. I know you need special ethernet cables to do a direct connection. I believe it's called a crossover cable. But again, I haven't done this.

No, you can't add network shares to the pool on WHS. But you can add external hard drives.
 
Maybe I'll give the networking thing a go and see how it plays out. It will be easy enough to switch back if it's a failure. While it could handle HD video, my process for downloading content involves downloading it onto my laptop and cleaning it up and copying it over the network to my desktop (which is currently acting as my HTPC). In that event, I think the load might be a bit much, and I think I could benefit from having a seperate link for the HTPC.

I'm on the fence about adding a BD/HD drive... it would be nice but from what I've read it seems like support for the 2 formats is still a little bit sketchy. It doesn't help the case that I already have both standalone BD and HD players. Another reason would be that the goal is to keep the residual costs low, as in not having to pay for media to play, or for cable, etc. Although when the spending starts, who knows where it will end :)
 
WCES Ryan said:
Maybe I'll give the networking thing a go and see how it plays out. It will be easy enough to switch back if it's a failure. While it could handle HD video, my process for downloading content involves downloading it onto my laptop and cleaning it up and copying it over the network to my desktop (which is currently acting as my HTPC). In that event, I think the load might be a bit much, and I think I could benefit from having a seperate link for the HTPC.
Click to expand...

I download content on my desktop, copy it over to my server and then watch on my HTPC. It can handle the load. HD video streams at around 7MB/s. Doesn't take up much speed at all.
 
I don't really have any input on the build, but if you're gonna buy from ncix.com, make sure you pricematch with directcanada.com, they're owned by the same people who own ncix and directcanada's prices are (almost) always lower. If you can't pricematch something, make sure you add it to your cart via ncix's weekly sales pages (if it's on sale). Even if the item is on sale and you don't add if from the sales page, you'll get it at regular price.
 
Alright, I just bit the bullet. I ended up going with:

AMD Phenom 9750 2.4ghz quad core
Asus M2N-E mobo
Corsair TwinX 4gb ram
XFX 8800GT 512mb
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W PSU
Silverstone Lascala LC17B
Samsung Spinpoint 1TB
Seagate Barracuda 500GB
Samsung DVDRW

Came out to about $1150 after price matching and the like. Pretty excited, but still going through a bit of sticker shock, lol. Will post pics when stuff comes.
 
WCES Ryan said:
Alright, I just bit the bullet. I ended up going with:

AMD Phenom 9750 2.4ghz quad core
Asus M2N-E mobo
Corsair TwinX 4gb ram
XFX 8800GT 512mb
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W PSU
Silverstone Lascala LC17B
Samsung Spinpoint 1TB
Seagate Barracuda 500GB
Samsung DVDRW

Came out to about $1150 after price matching and the like. Pretty excited, but still going through a bit of sticker shock, lol. Will post pics when stuff comes.
Click to expand...

That's serious overkill. You certainly don't need 4gb of ram or a 8800gt. A 2.4ghz CPU is also overkill when the HD material is being offloaded. I have a 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo and I don't even use half of it.
HD offloading can be done with a video card for under $50 just as well as a 8800GT, if not better. Such as the ATI 3450 with 5.1 over HDMI.
And the Intel board I mentioned coming out next month will do all onboard video HD offloading along with better audio.

Of course if you plan on gaming with it too that's a different story.
 
Totally overkill. But it has to last at LEAST a few years (I'd like to get 5 out of it), so if it has to be a little bit extreme now then so be it (plus it's more fun that way :)). It will see a lot more than just playing media files too, it will have to do a lot of encoding (3 tv tuners and a big schedule of recordings), and probably some gaming. The 8800GT only cost $109.99 anyways, who wouldn't go for that price? RAM is cheap enough too, might as well fill er up.
 
If your spending that kind of money, you should go ahead and budget in a router and some other networking components as well. For another $70-$80 you would be good. Just as an example, here is how mine is setup.

Linksys ---------------------> Gaming/surfing PC
WirelessG
router ---------------------> 10/100/1000 Network Switch -----> HTPC and ------->Server




So, as is it is right now, I have my Wireless G in charge of everything. Then I connected my gaming/surfing computer and wireless laptops directly to the router. The Wireless G has a built in 4 port switch, so I ran another connection to a seperate switch, then plugged my HTPC and Server into that switch. The switch keeps all of my media traffic from using the rest of my bandwith.
Newegg currently has the LINKSYS WRT54G Wireless G for $39, and the LINKSYS EG005W Gigabit workgroup switch for $34. Add in a couple CAT 5e or CAT 6 cables at about $2-3 each, and your right at about $80.

If you build a server, then WHS is a pretty good product. I am slightly a control freak though, so I wasn't a big fan of the way it automatically allocated drives and built the storage area. I switched over to Server 2003, first using software RAID 5 then hardware RAID when I got my new server. I just created the Movie and Music folders on the server, set them up as shares, then on my HTPC just mapped those shared drives and everything is good.
 
WCES Ryan said:
Totally overkill. But it has to last at LEAST a few years (I'd like to get 5 out of it), so if it has to be a little bit extreme now then so be it (plus it's more fun that way :)).
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Totally unrealistic. At the rate that hardware and standards change your going to have to upgrade that in about a year or two anyways.

For another thing, that thing is going to be pretty noisy. Especially the PSU, I've had that PSU and it got pretty noisy.
It will see a lot more than just playing media files too, it will have to do a lot of encoding (3 tv tuners and a big schedule of recordings), and probably some gaming. The 8800GT only cost $109.99 anyways, who wouldn't go for that price? RAM is cheap enough too, might as well fill er up.
Click to expand...
Too make any use of four gigs of memory you have to use Vista 64 which is total crap for HTPC use. Check around, theres a guy here having trouble just getting VMC64 working.
 
You can do it in Vista 64 you just need 64bit codecs. I prefer video on Vista x64 as it seems smoother than 32bit Vista.
Here's a link to the necessary files/codecs:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=170561

That video card will make 0 difference over a much cheaper or even onboard when it comes to video, encoding or otherwise. Which is why I reccomend a cheap card as it uses less power and produces less heat.

I used to run an HD Home Run which allowed me to record 2 HD shows at once. I could also stream another HD movie over the network with no issues whatsoever. I only use 2gb of ram and a Nvidia 8500GT. My CPU is the cheapest Core 2 Duo I could find at the time which is 2.2ghz. None of that even taxes it.
Home Theater PC's are very different than gaming PC's. And while a high end video card is needed and will yield benefits for gaming it doesn't do jack over a cheap card(or onboard) when it comes to video(assming you have a card or onboard capable of HD offloading).

But you did say you wanted to use it for both.
 
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