Please help! - advice on building HTPC urgently needed

elsmandino · Post by **elsmandino** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:47 pm

Hello.

I am building an HTPC, which has got to be quiet and efficient. The problem is that I am a bit of a newbie with this sort of thing and there are hundreds of conflicting views on the net over the speeds of hard drives that should be used and whether intel run slightly cooler and more efficiently than the equivalent AMD chip and the best chipset for onboard graphics.

I have set out my requirements and the specs, based upon what I have read and would be very grateful for your opinions on any changes I should make.

It will not be used for gaming, but has to be capable of producing full 1080p picture quality/playing blu-ray.

The computer is going to be plugged into my tv in the lounge and I eventually intend to wire cat6 all over my house, via a gigabyte router - so I can stream live or recorded tv to two other televisions via media extenders.

I also have a sat dish with twin lnb and an external aerial, so the computer has got to be capable (in the unlikely event) of recording two channels, whilst allowing live tv to be watched in the living room as well as streaming a recording to one of the media extenders all at the same time - this will not happen very often, but probably will happen eventually.

The computer is going to be used as a replacement for my DVR, so it needs to come out of sleep mode properly and come on automatically to record and return to S3 afterwards.

Hard drive - F3 1TB Samsung (I looked at 5400 rpm hard drives, but although they are quieter, decided that I would need a 7,200 rpm hard drive for simultaneous recording and streaming)

PSU - Corsair 450HX

Mobo - Asus M3N78-EM (this has 2 x pci slots, 1x pci 1 and 1 x pci 16 and NVIDIA GeForce 8300 chipset)

TV Tuner cards (three of them) - 2 PCI Hauppage WinTV Nova HD S2 Tuner cards (for two freesat channels) and 1 Hauppauge HVR 2200 MCE Dual Hybrid PCI Express card (for two digital channels)

Case - Antec Fusion Remote Max

CPU - Athlon II x2 240

OS - Windows 7, using media centre as the front end

Optical Drive - LG Blu-Ray

RAM - 2 x 2GB 800Mhz DDR2 RAM (I know that 2GB would be enough, but RAM is pretty cheap so thought I would go the whole hog)

Your comments would be greatly appreciated before I take the plunge

Thx

incorrect · Post by **incorrect** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 2:02 pm

the hard drive rpm has less to do with your requirements than you think, you need a drive with strong multithreaded-io-handling firmware, and the samsung f1 and f2 drives performed terribly. there is as of yet no f3 review that shows whether samsung has fixed this, but it would be a big problem for you. see this review page for a demonstration of the f2.

the rest looks good to me, i haven't kept up with tv input technology so can't really comment on it. i know there are competent usb tuners now that might free up some space for you, but i know little to nothing about software control.

theycallmebruce · Post by **theycallmebruce** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:29 pm

I'm no expert on HTPCs, but I'm a bit surprised that hard drive performance is an important consideration in an HTPC. I would have expected that any modern hard disk drive should be able to read or write fast enough to stream video to and from disk, especially given the large amount of RAM available in a modern PC to act as a disk cache. What are the throughput requirements for simultaneous recording and streaming?

elsmandino · Post by **elsmandino** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 2:29 pm

Sorry, what do you mean by throughput requirements?

theycallmebruce · Post by **theycallmebruce** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 4:13 pm

By throughput requirements, I mean how much data must be transferred to and from the disk continuously when using the HTPC in the way that you intend? Another word for throughput is bandwidth.

You could test this on another PC. Run your HTPC software, and use a monitoring tool (eg the built in Windows performance monitor) to measure the sustained read and write transfer rates while simultaneously recording and playing back. Use the "largest" (in bits per second) type of recordings which you want to work with in your real system.

I don't know for sure, but I would think that disk throughput won't be an issue. Encoding / decoding throughput maybe.

ilovejedd · Post by **ilovejedd** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 5:34 pm

theycallmebruce wrote:I don't know for sure, but I would think that disk throughput won't be an issue. Encoding / decoding throughput maybe.

Meh, ATSC maxes out at 19Mbps (2.4MB/s). Most HD broadcasts are well below that. I have a 2-hour recording (Heroes season 4 premier) is 10.8GB which translates to 12.3Mbps (1.5MB/s). Admittedly, it was QAM and it's possible the cable company re-encoded to a slightly lower bitrate. The HTPC was recording another show at the same time while my parents were channel surfing so that's effectively 3 streams (2 recordings + live TV buffer) at once on a Seagate Momentus 5400.4 320GB laptop drive. Unless you're recording a number of streams at the same time (maybe more than 6?), I wouldn't worry about the hard drive.

By the way, for a recording hard drive, you'd probably want to use 64k allocation units.

Whoops. Just noticed you live in England. No idea what throughput you have over there but I rather think it wouldn't be that much different.

mgarl10024 · Post by **mgarl10024** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 6:32 am

Hi,

Take a look at: viewtopic.php?t=53664.

I'm in the UK and have recently used these bits to build a media center that I was very happy with. I have 3 freeview tuners.

I've been able to record 3 streams, run a job to check for adverts, and be playing back a program, all without incident (I think <50% i/o) on a single 7200rpm WD Green HD (and this was selected for power efficiency not speed).

In terms of CPU, I think it makes little difference tbh. I bought the 5050e and was very pleased. Some people say you can get better efficiency by buying a higher spec Athlon and downclocking, but I couldn't comment.

Happy to answer any questions about my setup,

Cheers,

MG

elsmandino · Post by **elsmandino** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 10:06 am

Thanks guys - I can see that I have come to the right place!

Thanks for clearing up the Hard drive query - looks that I should just go with a 1TB WD10EADS Caviar Green then.

My main problem now is going to be which motherboard to go with. I definitely want onboard graphics. I don't really have a preference for a cpu brand either - whatever fits the board.

I originally went for an nvidia 8300 chipset board, but have read that it would be worth upgrading to an ATI 785G because it is better. Now I have read that this chipset has problems with BBC HD (which I shall be hoping to get via my Freesat dish) and decided just to go with the nvidia. I then read that the 9 series nvidia boards offer much better video performance than the 8 series and ATI chipsets and are noticably more power efficient.

This was all fine and well, but then I found out that only intel offer cpus for the series 9 boards - (started to get a bit dispondant here as I had pretty much set my heart on an Athlon II X2 240). Further reading then led to me to read that this was not necessarily a bad thing, as the equivalent intel CPU (E7200 I think) was double the price of the Athlon, but more efficient/ran cooler).

Sorry for all that - have got a bit obsessive about trying to get the right build. With all this in mind, should I just go with an nvidia 9 series board and an intel cpu? I don't mind paying more for the outlay if it gives me a more efficient/cooler/quieter HTPC in the end.

mgarl10024 · Post by **mgarl10024** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 10:12 am

Hi again,

What software do you intend to run on this machine?

If it's Linux, my advice would be to avoid the ATI chips. I bought the 780g chasing after the power efficiency, but the Linux drivers (open source or proprietary) were just not there and resulted in an unstable system. I ended up buying NVidia to get around it.

I hear the Windows ATI drivers are a lot better, but can't comment.

Finally, if buying a green drive, read up on the idle head parking feature. I disabled mine, but many leave theirs claiming it's all FUD. I'll let you make your own mind up on that, but after disabling the feature, I've been very happy with all 3 drives that I bought.

Hope that helps,

MG

elsmandino · Post by **elsmandino** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 10:22 am

Thanks. I was going to use Windows7 and MCE, though would like the option of using a linux front end if it were better (I know there are quite a few of them out there).

Based upon what you have said and this guide this article http://www.linuxtech.net/features/best_ ... oards.html
do you think I should go with the nvidia 9 series and an intel cpu after all?

mgarl10024 · Post by **mgarl10024** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 12:10 pm

Hi,

You aught to consider MythTV. Depends how technically savvy you are and how prepared you are to tinker. I knew nothing about media centers, but within a month or two part time I had a fully working MythTV installation. Occasionally I get the occasional glitch, but it's pretty good and FREE!
Alternatively, the low hassle, higher cost option is Windows.
Down to personal preference.

I'm affraid I can't really advise you on Intel / Windows - there may be others who can. On the face of it though it sounds a good choice, but I'd wait for a few other recommendations from people more knowledgable than me.

Thanks,

MG

ilovejedd · Post by **ilovejedd** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 2:12 pm

elsmandino wrote:This was all fine and well, but then I found out that only intel offer cpus for the series 9 boards - (started to get a bit dispondant here as I had pretty much set my heart on an Athlon II X2 240). Further reading then led to me to read that this was not necessarily a bad thing, as the equivalent intel CPU (E7200 I think) was double the price of the Athlon, but more efficient/ran cooler).

Hmm, I don't think they still make those (E7200). It's already been displaced by the Pentium E5200 and now, I think Intel has stopped producing the E5200 in favor of the Celeron Wolfdales (E3200 & E3300). Based on price, the equivalent of the Athlon II X2 240 would probably be the Celeron E3300. My guess, though, the Athlon 240 would perform better than the Celeron E3300. AMD chips tend to sell for less than they're worth while Intel chips tend to sell for more (at least performance-wise).

On the upside, I think a review from Anand showed the Celerons posting fairly low power consumption.

Edit:
The review was from X-bit Labs. I just got the link from a forum post on Anandtech. The methodology for getting CPU-only power consumption is suspect, but you can see that the whole system power consumption at load is even lower than the E5200's. Guess that's what reducing the cache gives you.