HTPC Builds - Opinions Needed

[wmcuser1233]

Hey everyone would just like to get some opinions. I am thinking about building a dedicated htpc. Right now I have a family pc that is being used for wmc. It has a AMD Phenom II X6 1075T 3ghz with 8gb of ram. With two tuners, a infinity and dual tuner hauppauge. This setup is working pretty good but I would like to build a dedicated machine so I dont have to kick people off to mess with wmc. Right now I have it narrowed down to two builds. One is amd based and the other is intel based. Right now I am leaning towards the intel build. The machine will be used to stream to around 3 or 4 extenders at the same time. It wont be hooked up to a tv or anything its only purpose will be to record tv and stream to my extenders. Like I said before the current build I have now works great. I have no problem streaming to 4 extenders at the same time while recording 6 channels at the same time. Anyone one think there will be any performance issues if I switch to what I have posted below? Thanks for any help.

Amd Build
Case $44.99
PSU $19.99 after rebate
COOLMAX ZX Series ZX-500 500W
RAM $0
4 gb ddr3 1333
Motherboard $59.99 after rebate
MSI A75A-G35 FM1 AMD A75
CPU $39.99
AMD A4-3300 Llano 2.5GHz
Total $164.96

Intel build
Case $44.99
PSU $19.99 after rebate
COOLMAX ZX Series ZX-500 500W
RAM $0
4 gb ddr3 1333
Motherbaord $43.50 after rebate
MSI Z68A-G43 (G3) LGA 1155
CPU $105
Intel Core i3-2100 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz
Total $213.48

[lithium630]

I've had pretty good luck with Intel and AMD, so I'm not sure how much it really matters. RAM is so cheap now though I would go with at least 8GB. There is another option though. If you like your current setup, you could just enable concurrent RDP sessions. You could remote to the PC and do whatever you want to without interrupting anyone else. Missing remote has a good guide.

http://www.missingremote.com/guide/how- ... pack-1-rtm

[wmcuser1233]

Thank you for the info. Another reason I want to upgrade is for more hard drive bays. The pc I have now only has two 3.5 bays and they are both full. The case I am looking at now has six bays. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811147160 You are right on ram being cheap I think I will upgrade to 8gb shortly after I get everything setup. The 4gb I have now is from a machine that I just upgraded to 8gb.

[foxwood]

It looks like that AMD motherboard only has 2 slots for RAM, so you'd have to replace the RAM, whereas you could add more RAM to the Intel board, which has 4 slots.

But the Intel board doesn't appear to have a HDMI connector, which is a useful thing to have on a HTPC!

[wmcuser1233]

Good catch on the hdmi I could have swore it had one. Its really not a problem though since its not going to be hooked up to a tv. Its just going to sit in the room and stream to extenders.

EDIT:

Thanks for all of the input. I decided to go with the intel build. Should be here by the end of the week. I also picked up a Kingston HyperX Blu Red Series 8gb kit. So I should be good on ram now.

[wmcuser1233]

I switched everything over about five days ago and everything is working great so far. My infinitv temps were around 60 Celsius, so I added a side case fan and that dropped the temps to around 45. Should I try getting the temps lower than that? For some reason I had to manually download and install the digital cable advisor to get my digital channels. I never had to do that on my other machine. I considered putting windows 8 on the machine but I decided to wait until sp1 comes out. So I just stuck windows 7 Pro on the machine. I like the fact that I have the option to put more tuners in this machine. The slots on my old machine were all full. Overall I am very happy with my decision to build a dedicated machine for media center.