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Thinking About Going HTPC

N

NASTY_LOS

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2008
Messages
193
Just moved into a bigger place and am contemplating on utilizing an HTPC in my living room. I plan to use this HTPC to play and store movies, some blue rays, as well as playing music.

Don't know if I am going to get a 60 or 55 inch LED. I will be getting either a pair of Klipsch or Polk Audio floor standings to blast my music. I am also planning on getting some surround speakers for movies. That said, I have no idea on how much of an investment I would need to put into this HTPC. My budget would be maybe $500 to $1000 not including the floor speakers or receiver.

I still have the PC in my sig. Maybe some parts would be of service? Gives me a reason to upgrade my PC :D
 
The current PC would do the job just fine. One option is to build a cheap Sandy Bridge machine with an i5 2300 could be had around $700 with qualtiy components. Another alternative is building an i3 540 system. for about $100 less. Neither including a TV Tuner/DCT if you wanted to watch/record TV programs.

If you want a media pc case, then you'll need to use a micro board of course and your current setup is ATX so that wouldn't be too viable. Personally, I would upgrade my current PC to a nice SB setup and use various parts off the old PC to make the HTPC.
 
I would prefer to build a new one for this endeavor. I was looking at one of those Lian Li htpc cases and liked the way they resembled a receiver.

I'm not concerned about recording shows right now. I got a DVR with my cable box. So for now, we'll use that. Definitely wanna use Pandora but some receivers and TVs have that preinstalled.
 
I came up with this quick build which is very solid.

Intel i5-2300 Socket 1155 (Sandy Bridge)
Asus P8H67-M Pro Motherboard
4gb Kingston HyperX Memory
LG Blu-Ray Drive

60gb OCZ Agility 2 SSD for OS
2 x 2TB Western Digital EARS Hard Drives for storage.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The total from Newegg came out to be around $860 without shipping.

You can obviously do without a few things, like the SSD and one of the 2TB drives to drop your costs back down to around $700. The rest are quality components. If you want to throw a video card in there, you can get a ATI 5450 for $60 or so.

--

An i3-540 build would be about $75 less give or take.
 
Just grab a cheapish i5 quad from the Dell outlet. They can be had for under $450 with patience and coupons. Toss in good storage drive for about $100 and stick the pc in a corner somewere, sans monitor since you'll be using Remote Desktop anyway. Add in a $100 refurbed xbox 360 arcade to use as an extender and you're done for $650.
 
GhostDog said:
Just grab a cheapish i5 quad from the Dell outlet. They can be had for under $450 with patience and coupons. Toss in good storage drive for about $100 and stick the pc in a corner somewere, sans monitor since you'll be using Remote Desktop anyway. Add in a $100 refurbed xbox 360 arcade to use as an extender and you're done for $650.
Click to expand...


If you want frankenstein, yes.
 
For sure, it's really F'd up.

I grabbed -

Inspiron Desktop 580 MiniTower
Processor: Intel Core i5-750 Processor (8MB Cache, 2.66GHz)
4 GB DDR3 NON-ECC SDRAM 1333MHz
750 GB SATA II Hard Drive
512MB NVIDIA GeForce G310 DDR3
16X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability

for $410 plus tax

And added

1.5T|WD 7K 64M WD1501FASS
for $110 from Newegg

Now it sits silenty in the corner of the other room and does a perfect job of recording and/or playing four HD streams to four 360's around the house, as well as cutting commercials, auto compressing, serving my media library and acting as a 24" photo frame (because I had a 24" ultrasharp not doing anything and the new MCE screen saver is nice). Less than a minute from power on to watching TV, everything "just works" - even for my 6 year old.

I already had 2 360's, grabbed an arcade for $100 brand new at Target and went ahead and got myself a new elite. So $440(pc) + $110(hd) + $400(two 360s) + 400(ceton tuner) means that $1350 got me whole home DVR for four TVs and the PC doesn't break a sweat - ever. Oh and my cable bill went down $60/month after removing all their equipment meaning it's all free in 23 months.

Definately feels frankensteiny.
 
I'd look more into your objectives. How quiet do you want it to be? Does form factor matter to you? How much time do you have on your hands? Do you want HTPC software or basically just a computer hooked up to your TV. This can become very all encompassing. I'd dig more into what you really want before going down this path.
 
general said:
I'd look more into your objectives. How quiet do you want it to be? Does form factor matter to you? How much time do you have on your hands? Do you want HTPC software or basically just a computer hooked up to your TV. This can become very all encompassing. I'd dig more into what you really want before going down this path.
Click to expand...

Doesn't have to be quiet. I plan on watching movies mostly and listening to music. Either way, the speakers would drown out any noise coming from the pc. I still plan on having my cable but eventually cut my cable in maybe a year or so.

This is going to go in my living room so I would have to keep it simple enough so my wife and kids could use
 
ok i know everyone is probably going to be really pissed off that i would even begin to suggest this to you... but considering your budget and needs, it may be the right fit.

check out "the scout" rig in my sig. i've had it up and running for about 2 months, it's tiny as hell, silent as hell, been using both netflix and hulu plus, using a 42 in samsung lcd (the only downside is lack of ODD, we either stream or download all media)

the total cost would be between $450 - $500 depending on sales tax, shipping (minus $100 if you already own a new copy of windows 7).

there is also a topdown pic of it floating around the htpc gallery that i posted recently
 
Looks small and nice 9guns.

63023077.jpg
 
If you're looking for something small and cheap, I'd suggest waiting for the upcoming AMD zacate parts. substantially more powerful than Atom and they do all the bells and whistles like bitstreaming audio. with GPU acceleration it will have no problem playing BD rips, and you can probably run one passively cooled. I'm seriously considering using one in a small mini ITX case for my next HTPC upgrade.
 
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