Morning guys and gals, Looking some advise please. Building my first HTPC for the lounge now that it's all done out nicely, but I also wanted to encorporate my data storage into that device and free up my gaming rig for some water cooling (Project 2 of 2) Could one of you beauties run a quick finger over this and let me know if it's good, bad, super overpowered? My concern is I've got 16GB of DDR4 for this machine, I don't think that's even necessary is it? The little Nvidia GPU should be enough to give the entire system a kick up to 4K and it'll be rigged up to do that when I can. --- My other query is, at the moment my gaming rig is an i7-950 @ 4.2Ghz, 6GB of DDR3 & a AMD 390X Fury and has never faulted me once. I know the CPU and memory are starting to get a little dated (The build was 2009/2010) with GFX card getting tri-annual updates. Do I just declock the GFX card and transfer all the kit into a HTPC box instead of buying fresh kit? So yeah. decent build? Suggestions? Thoughts? Ideas! All welcome
Skylake chips will do 4K video playback no problem. The GT 710 is a few years old now and I really wouldn't bother with one. I run a NAS/HTPC on a G4400 with a single DIMM of 8GB of memory in a B150N-GSM. I would not recommend this board though tbh. Lose the 16GB kit and drop in a single 8GB 2133 DIMM, it should be more than enough. Drop the 2.5" SATA drive and use the M.2 slot: the older Samsung drives are still great and dropping in price if you can find an EOL one, or, the Intel 600 series are pretty cheap. It'll save you a SATA connector for future drives. I wouldn't bother putting a 390X in a HTPC/NAS - you'll be burning through power for no reason at all. Try and shift it while it still has some value.
That's a good plan then man. The Nvid chip only costs dirt these days and I'm a fan of dedication. Swish. I haven't every used the M.2 stuff - hard to use or is as simple as PCI-E? That was my concern. I'm purposely installing Linux on the system as well to prevent me from jamming the big GFX card in there and playing games on the couch! Now... I've been away for forever and a day... when did you de-mod?!
De mod? Nearly 6 years ago when I joined ASUS HQ to build their online ROG brand. I've left since then ha Slap in the M.2 drive in the slot and the system will see it as a normal drive. Intel 600p 128GB is 50 quid. 1 x HDMI port, supporting a maximum resolution of 4096x2160@24 Hz * Support for HDMI 1.4 version. Ahh FFS it's only 24Hz. I just checked and Intel are being stupid co*ks again and not supporting HDMI 2.0 with Skylake or KabyLake, so you'll need DP 1.3 to HDMI 2.0 converter, which will still be cheaper than a graphics card and obviously much lower power. Otherwise it's ~$130 on an RX460, which just for 4K playback is crazy$. It's a shame FM2+ APUs don't even do HDMI 2.0 or have M.2.. Zen should though, but you'll be waiting well into Q1.
What i would recommend is - wait until Kaby Lake, if you could wait until now. The reasons : 1) HEVC (H.265) 10-bit and VP9 10-bit hardware decoding in Kaby Lake. Very important for 4k. 2) there is a higher chance of HDMI 2.0 motherboards than now; they are next to non-existent right now, so right now your only choice is to have DisplayPort output on your board and get one of these http://www.club-3d.com/index.php/pr...layport-12-to-hdmi-20-uhd-active-adapter.html or to get a GTX950/960/10xx (970 and 980 have only partial hardware HEVC decoding support).
You're waaaaay over cooking this. Find something based on the Celeron J3455 (Brand new chip, so still a bit rare, but does 4K HEVC and VP9 decoding). Start off with a Seagate 8TB archive drive (for stuff you will never delete) and a 240GB SSD for everything else. You'll need a SATA expansion card for more drives, but that's not a big deal. The entire system should draw under 40W from the wall, so the smaller the power supply, the better (sub 250W would be ideal). US link to an Asus board, should it interest you
Only two SATA ports and he's already got 3 drives. A B150 would be better. faugusztin - Kaby has hardware H265 in there, but still only 24Hz at 4K. I've not yet seen a board that does onboard DP to HDMI adaption, but would love to know.
That's why I recommended a single 8TB archive drive for the moment. A 2 port add in card can be found for 15 quid, and the board has 3 total PCIe 1x for anything else he might want.
Gigabyte has some with HDMI 2.0 via MCDP2800 : http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5481#ov http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5478#ov MCDP2800 product page : http://www.megachips.us/products/MCDP28_Products.php
