Building my small, quiet, capable HTPC for about $300

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LuckyDay

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Building my small, quiet, capable HTPC for about $300

#1

Post by LuckyDay » Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:03 pm

This is a build log of my new HTPC. I'm transitioning from running Media Center from my desktop PC in my office and streaming through my 360 to building a standalone HTPC to place near my TV.

I'm doing this on the lowest budget I can and doing it to suit all of my needs, maybe someone will find it useful, or at the very least it will serve as reviews of the motherboard and case I've bought here.

I'm not including a tuner in this cost as I already have the HD Prime, and you could go with a lot of different options in that department depending on your cable provider, subscription, needs, etc. And I didn't include the cost of an OS or software, as I have an extra licensed copy of Windows 7 and you could do this for free with Linux as well.

Shipping or tax will add a few bucks depending on where you buy also.

My needs in this HTPC are:

- Small (itx form factor)
- Cool
- Not ugly
- Run Media Center 7 well
- 500+GB of storage (I use about 250GB normally for DVR and back the rest up externally through NAS)
- Quiet

Here's my part list and cost breakdown:

$50 Case - HEC Black ITX Case from Newegg Small nice looking case that has room for a 3.5 drive, slim optical, and itx board. Standard front ports like USB plus the added bonus of eSATA.

$50
Motherboard - MSI Fuzzy RS490T AM2 socket keeps it cheap and low power and it's got ATI x1200 onboard with HDMI and optical audio out. There are tons of these around the web and on ebay for cheap.

$50 CPU - Athlon 64 x2 4000+ - 65w and you could go with a Sempron for cheaper and less power. I had this one left over from an old PC, but they're all over the place for around this price.

$12-25
2-4GB DDR2 800 I went with 4GB so I could share 512MB with the onboard video.

$65 OCZ 30GB SSD drive for OS - Great fast drive for Windows 7 with quick boot times and good Media Center performance. I got it on craigslist for $50, they can be found new for a bit more. This is optional, you could go with a single 3.5" drive if you wanted, but it also keeps sound low by using two small drives like I am.

$55 640GB 2.5" HDD Mine is a WD Scorpio, but similar. These are all over.

$12 3.5 to 2x2.5 drive adapter - Lets you use two 2.5" HDDs in the 3.5" bay on this case.

$15 Slim DVDRW drive - Tons online for cheap, any will do, just buy a black to match the case. I had one leftover from an old laptop that fits and looks fine.

$19 Adapter to convert SATA slim Optical to IDE - This is needed for me because I used both SATA slots on the board for HDDs. *edit* mis-typed earlier, not IDE, but connects your optical drive to your motherboards USB header. Perfect for me because there are two USB headers and only one is needed for this cases front ports.

Total cost is about $325 the way I did it, less if you don't go with SSD or 4GB of RAM.


I just finished assembling the system today and I'll post back an update on how quiet/fast it is later. I think for anyone looking to jump into the HTPC game on a budget this is a pretty good outline to follow. Another $50-150 bucks for a tuner or use it to stream Netflix/Hulu and you'd be good to go.

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Wolfshadw

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#2

Post by Wolfshadw » Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:51 pm

Not a bad little rig. There are a couple of what I think may be "gotchas", that I'd like to hear how you resolved.

1) I don't think that AMD ATI x1200 IGP is going to be able to handle any HD content very well.
2) There are no native Windows 7 drivers for that motherboard, only XP and Vista. Do the Vista drivers work with your Windows 7 install?
3) $15 is a little low for a slim DVD Drive. Cheapest I've found (new) was around $50. You might get lucky with a used one.
4) Did the stock AMD heat sink fit within that case?
5) The PCI slot is useless in that case (no rear port for it). I thought I might want to use a two-port SATAII controller in there.

Again, all in all, not bad (if it all works for ya!) :D

-Wolf sends

adam1991

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#3

Post by adam1991 » Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:13 pm

When I built mine back in March, I did it slowly and carefully. Intel DH55TC mobo off Ebay for $52 shipped, for example.

One trick I used was this: once I knew what motherboard and processor I wanted, I watched Micro Center for that processor. They had a sale on BYO stuff one week, and I got the i3 I wanted for cheap--$92 or something. Fantastic.

For whatever reason, I didn't get around to buying anything else right away. No more than a week later, Micro Center sent me an email with custom coupons for all sorts of BYO stuff. It seems they knew I bought a processor but hadn't bought anything else, so they threw this out to entice me. And it worked. They had everything except the memory I wanted, all at prices that nobody else could beat. They got my business.

I ended up with the aforementioned i3/DH55TC combo (onboard HDMI was my goal) in a nice Antek case (incl power supply) with a 320GB drive for OS and a 2TB drive for recordings, 8GB memory, and an optical drive--all ready to plug in my tuner card--for $450 out the door. I wasn't going for cheap, but I ended up inexpensive.

A friend of mine wants me to help him build Mark II of that platform. Hey, lookie there--Micro Center is selling the i5 2500k, his preferred cpu, for $149--that's $100 off. He picked it up last Friday, and is waiting to see if he gets the same sort of coupon-filled email that he can use to flesh it all out.

Lemme tell you, when the tuner card and a couple of XBox extenders cost twice as much as the entire computer...

LuckyDay

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#4

Post by LuckyDay » Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:37 pm

Wolfshadw wrote:Not a bad little rig. There are a couple of what I think may be "gotchas", that I'd like to hear how you resolved.

1) I don't think that AMD ATI x1200 IGP is going to be able to handle any HD content very well.
2) There are no native Windows 7 drivers for that motherboard, only XP and Vista. Do the Vista drivers work with your Windows 7 install?
3) $15 is a little low for a slim DVD Drive. Cheapest I've found (new) was around $50. You might get lucky with a used one.
4) Did the stock AMD heat sink fit within that case?
5) The PCI slot is useless in that case (no rear port for it). I thought I might want to use a two-port SATAII controller in there.

Again, all in all, not bad (if it all works for ya!) :D

-Wolf sends
1. I was hesitant about it, and I'll find out when I set it all up tonight. I'm going off past experience when I had an x700 board that did pretty well as long as I had a tuner taking care of most of the work. For the recording at least.

For the playback, we will see. I will just have to throw a lot of shared memory at it and hope it works, but I think it will be ok.

2. It was a pain to hunt them down, but yes they all work perfectly fine so far including the audio out on the HDMI.

3. Newegg has one for $25, most of the cheaper ones online are used, I found a few refurbed at Micro Center for less.

4. Nope, one thing I forgot in the price listing. $7 cooler master from
Micro Center works fine though and is 42mm tall (plenty of room).

5. It is definitely useless, lol.

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#5

Post by LuckyDay » Thu Oct 06, 2011 5:20 am

So far so good. HD recordings in Media Center play perfect, seek smooth, and let me skip around with no video stutter or audio desync.

Allocated 512MB of ram to the integrated video and have 3.5GB left for the system.

HDMI out and I'm watching in 720p resolution. It runs well enough I would suspect 1080 would be fine.

Going to test out some mkv files with higher bit rate soon.

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Wolfshadw

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#6

Post by Wolfshadw » Thu Oct 06, 2011 1:17 pm

Nice that it's playing HD content! I was thinking only the HD3xxx series and later could handle HD content (maybe if DRM controlled hd content). I just got my Newegg e-mail that shows they have the slim DVD drive for $21 now (on sale). Please keep us up to date on how well it's working!

-Wolf sends

LuckyDay

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#7

Post by LuckyDay » Thu Oct 06, 2011 4:39 pm

Update:

Ok, so there's some good and some bad, still remains to be seen what can be done about it (and I'm not opposed to popping a different mobo in here, but wanna test this extensively first).

The good:
HD recording - great
HD playback of recordings - great
MKV 1080p - great

The bad:

Having some "playback not supported by this device" errors pop up on live tv from the HD Prime. The strange thing about it is that it's not consistent. I can tune a channel (takes a second to pop up the picture, but it works) and watch it for about 20 seconds, then the error is displayed. When I turn away from the channel to another, and then back, it works again sometimes, and sometimes displays the error.

Going to dive into that. If I can't figure it out there are other AM2 boards with HDMI that I could use (a few with HD3200 integrated and HDMI 1.3 which I would expect would be fine. )



Back to more testing...

adam1991

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#8

Post by adam1991 » Thu Oct 06, 2011 4:53 pm

I read that error differently. "Playback not supported by this device" could mean the HD Prime, not the computer itself.

When my incoming cable signal was low, I'd get "not authorized" errors now and again.

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#9

Post by LuckyDay » Thu Oct 06, 2011 5:05 pm

That could also be it. It's on a splitter now so I'll try a direct line next.

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#10

Post by LuckyDay » Thu Oct 06, 2011 6:57 pm

It's this exact error, few seconds of TV and sound, then the blue background with the error listed below.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... d385dcbb12

Lots of people around the web seem to have had it, so at least I have a lot of fixes to try.

And again, it's only on a few channels, and not even 100% of the time on those. Today I tested on a network station (shouldn't ever be protected) and it worked and I watched half a show, turned the channel, turned it back and got the error.

Strange.

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#11

Post by LuckyDay » Fri Oct 14, 2011 8:00 pm

In the end, this problem seems to be in the HDCP support in the inboard graphics. Unfortunately, with the integrated driver not being supported anymore by AMD it won't be something I can solve.

I'm going to move from the AM2 board to an Intel one so I can use the Intel HD graphics which from what I've heard run WMC7 HD very well.

I think I can still keep cost down pretty low, we will see.

adam1991

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#12

Post by adam1991 » Sat Oct 15, 2011 2:43 am

Be patient, and shop carefully.

Back in March, I got my Intel DH55 board, mini-ATX, for $52 shipped off of Ebay. Open box, but the only thing missing was the box. Anyway, I went Intel for exactly the reasons you're seeing--and I have zero regrets.

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#13

Post by LuckyDay » Sat Oct 15, 2011 3:12 am

Well the patience didn't work out, but I did get what I wanted.

Found a h67 chipset board for $75 and I'm going to pick up an i3 2105 along with it. Total is about $200 now for the CPU/mobo compared to the $100 in the original budget.

So for $100 more (I should change the thread title), I will have an i3 and more processing power than before, along with Intel HD 3000 graphics within the ITX form factor.

The 3000 will easily handle the HD graphics and even a little gaming if I feel like it. I have a Pentium dual core with the first revision of the Intel HD and it handles everything fine on another system.

I also get more SATA ports (take advantage of that front eSata port) and still on 65w CPU usage.

I found a Slim Blu ray drive on craigslist for $30, so that's a bonus.

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#14

Post by adam1991 » Sat Oct 15, 2011 10:16 am

which h67 board did you get?

LuckyDay

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#15

Post by LuckyDay » Sat Oct 15, 2011 4:41 pm

http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0361415

I've always liked the gigabyte boards I've had and this one has a lot of good features.

It was open box for $90 plus the mail in rebate.

Able to return the SO-Dimm sticks I got before and got the Dimm equivalent for cheaper. So made up some more ground on budget there.

Now I just have to wait for the CPU to get here. The i3 2105 includes the 3000 integrated graphics instead of the 2000 which is a pretty big difference. But no local places have the 2105, only the 2000.

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