Hi, I want to get rid of one of my machines which contains a 460gtx, an i7 920 cpu, 6gb of RAM and an asus board and build a small low energy blu ray player/media player/websurfer. Basically the HTPC I built from my old parts creates a load of heat and is a bit overkill for it's intended purpose; it seemed like a good idea at the time, plus I thought I might game with it but I wont. What's the bare minimum for hi-def play back with no stalling and such. I'd prefer to go with intel and I'm interested in using the on-chip GPU. Has anyone had any experience with these? Should I be looking at an i3 or an i5? Thanks! edit: tv is 40 inch 1080p
You could probably get by on an i3 or i5 integrated but I wouldn't recommend it. Look at the Intel Atom + Ion combo and the AMD E-350 APU. They are both low power chips and perform well with 1080p video. Linux support on the AMD chip isnt great at the moment so it depends on your desired OS and some software works better with particular integrated GPUs than others so this should also be taken into account. If it were my money I'd get an E-350 but for a little more grunt you could get an i3 or Pentium Chip with a low power GPU like a Geforce GT 240, GT 430 or Radeon HD 5570. Another advantage of the Atom/Ion or E-350 is the size. These are generally Mini-ITX or microATX based boards that have a low profile because they put out so little heat that the heatsink can be small. Sent from my Desire HD using Tapatalk
A Asus P8H61-M PRO REV3.0 mobo and a i2 2120 should do the trick. But an ASUS AM3 M4A78LT-M and an AMD X250 would do the job and be less then half the cost.
Do you want the whole machine? 'Cos I use this. I looked and looked and looked and I couldn't get what I wanted (small, new standards such as DDR3 and ION2, silent, etc) cheaper anywhere, even if I'd have built it myself.
I want to use my blu-ray drive and terrabyte hard drive for storage along with SSD for OS (windows 7 ultimate)
I am just in the process of putting together an HTPC (but I am using an old dual core E2400 and motherboard with some new bits), there are a lot of knowledgable people on here but I would also recommend browsing the relevant AVForums channel - I got a lot from there. My general research suggests that Atom / Ion type combo can be left a little underpowered running W7 MCE and depending on what you want to be doing with your HTPC even without gaming. Most people favour the i3 platform, onboard graphics (especially Sandy bridge) is OK and can do 1080p but suffers from the 23.97 fps bug which causes frames to drop periodically. the way round this is to use a cheap fully compliant graphics card. I have bought a half-height passively cooled ATI 5450 to get round this issue. Ayway, good luck with it Chunks
i have an atom/ion that i use for my htpc/server and it performs well enough for 1080p when using dxva. i generally use boxee and mpc as a fallback for things boxee dosen't like. a friend has an i3 book size system thats sold as an htpc and gets on well with that also. can't remember the maker off hand. if i was in the market for something right now i would probably just get a ZOTAC ZBOX-AD03BR-PLUS-U and be done with it.
