Hi I'm thinking of building a HTPC for the living room and to reduce the 4 large boxes of dvds and cds I currently have sitting in the spare bedroom into a more manageable and usable thing but I'm not sure what criteria to use when looking to build a htpc. With my pc build it was easy - look at the hardware buyers guide for rough ideas, post a thread here with a budget and hey presto gaming rig I love and a surprisingly pleasant relaxing weekend making it. Alas no HPTC hardware buyers guide or even that many case reviews... Budget: £1000 maximum Main uses of intended build: HTPC, ripping and storing dvds / blu-ray / cd, playing ripped files or dvds / blu-ray / cd, browsing internet, dling files for replay, wireless network connection. Parts required: All Previous build information (list details of parts): No parts available Monitor resolution: Pioneer KURO KRL-37V 37in LCD TV Full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels Storage requirements: Large dvd and cd collection needs a digital home and backup facility plus room for future expansion. will you be overclocking: no Any motherboard requirements (no. of USB, Xfire/SLI, fan headers): not that i know of Extra information about desired system: Currently we have a tv stand / thing from ikea which has a shelf that allows 10cm to get stuff into... from looking at scan this doesn't leave many options for the case so something that stands alongside it and looks unobtrusive may be the way to go (i love fractal cases). However hptc cases also seem to lack hdd slots and if i'm going to be putting my entire dvd collection on it I think it may need backing up so it doesn't all go horribly wrong if the single hdd dies... It will need a wireless keyboard, mouse and remote i guess but that's about as far as it needs to go. I am deeply not fussed about the case having some star trek graphic equaliser type display on the front like a lot of htpc cases seem to have.
Personally, I'd go for a two-tier system - have an Atom-based system under the TV and a separate storage system (FreeNAS or unRAID) in a separate room connected by CAT5. That way you don't need to worry about backing up every night, and you can have a reasonably quiet system under the TV. The storage server doesn't need particularly powerful hardware, apart from the hard drives, you could probably build it from spare parts you have knocking around. 2 or 3 1Tb or 1.5Tb hard drives for storage, and you'll be set. That'll leave the bulk of your budget for the player PC, although a dual-core Atom is more than capable of playing 1080p material. Since the movies are stored on a separate server, you could also boot the player PC from a smallish SSD.
Bit-Tech doesn't have a HTPC-buyers guide, but luckily SPCR does: http://www.silentpcreview.com/HTPC_Home_Server That's a great place to start, you even get the professional noise measurements so you don't have to wait and see how noisy the system turns out to be. The budget seems just about right as well, just drop a couple of hard drives to make room for the wireless card and BR-drive. The only problem that I can see with that build is that the case is very deep and might not fit your stand/shelf-thing, but really that's a problem with almost every HTPC-case, and definitely with the ones that fit that number of hard drives. If the GD03 is too large, there's also the great GD04, which I loved .You'd have to switch the motherboard for a mATX-offering of choice and the GD04 can only take two 3,5" drives, but you could still slap two 2 TB storage drives in there and squeeze the OS-SSD-drive somewhere... Hope this helped.
Thanks for the replies... if i had room for the silverstone i would probably go for it but it won't go on the stupid small shelf so I think I'm likely to go for the fractal define mini (or a similar sleek small case to stand next to tv stand) when it comes out then I can run a couple of storage drives and an os-ssd as suggested. I'm not too sure what motherboard or chipset to go for with those for and i guess it would be worth waiting for this sandybridge intel chipset thingymebobby... any suggestions on motherboard / gfx card / tv decoder / soundcard and processor would be gratefully recieved. As for the atom / nas combo - it's a tempting and nice idea but i'm having to take my gaming rig wireless as i'm not allowed to run wires all over the flat so unfortunatley it's a bit of a non-starter.
Lian Li HTPC Aluminium Black Case : PC-C39B 435 x 97 x 400 mm so it'll fit on your shelf with a whole 3mm to spare!!! mATX, with space for two 3.5" drives, so I'm sure that if you drilled and tapped some holes for a mITX motherboard you'd be able to fit in two more drives (at least) which should allow you sufficient storage for a goodly number of films etc. An Ion2 should be able to meat 1080p on your screen with no need for discrete graphics, equally the forthcoming zacate should be real contenders for this corner of the market.
I'd recommend a WDTV LIVE media player and a NAS drive. Been running this for ages and I've nothing badvto say about it.
personally if i was getting ready to build a new htpc / server now, i would definitely go with zacate platform, as it looks loads better than atom. otherwise if not that a core i3 mini itx system. in either case i would still stick with the lian li pc-q08 case. its quite small, and has 6 3,5 hdd bay, 1 5,25 and takes regular atx power supplies. it also comes in some different colors so you should find one that would go with your decor easy enough, or if not get the plain alu and have it anodized the color of your choice. then i would get 1 smaller drive for boot drive, and 5x 1 or 2tb drives to fill in the rest of the drive bays, and a blueray optical. you should be able to do all that for 1000 easy.
+1. I have put all my CD's, DVD's and Bluray disks (few hundred) on to my NAS box. I am able to view/listen to them in two separate rooms. I use the PS3 in one room and WD TV Live in the other. The PS3 is a little fussy with some of the file types, but WD TV Live plays them all. Works great! Edit: Also take into account that you want a system as quiet as possible. With the system above, the NAS box can be put anywhere in the house (e.g. hidden in a cupboard) and can stream your media to multiple WD TV Live's around the house if you wish. The WD TV Live is completely silent.
In amongst all the htpc cases I seemed to have missed or for some reason dismissed the Lian Li HTPC Aluminium Black Case : PC-C39B. This looks like an excellent case and I think I'd be happy running two large hdd and maybe backing up on my gaming rig or getting some sort of nas for the room i'm allowed to stick lots of tech in. The living room having network cables running all around it is a no no and I'm not going to get to take the floorboards up to run the cables underneath. So I guess next thing is to nail down the mATX board / processor / sfx / gfx card and freeview decoder any suggestions on those and of course cooling would be appreciated. thanks for all the advice... am feeling overwhelmed by info at the minute - but it's better than feeling completely clueless.
Dont go for an Atom based system as I find my Atom based HTPC annoyingly slow. Have you considered any of the power line network adapters that use your house wiring as a network cable? It will stream HD content with no problems at all and it worked really well for me when i was in temporary accommodation. I would stick a Blu-Ray drive into your gaming PC and use it for ripping and store your content on a NAS or file server. Keep your actual HTPC as small and quiet as possible. Currently I have filled my main rig with HDD's and store the content on there until I'm ready for a server.
Hmm thanks for all your reponses. Still not going to go the NAS route due to female pwnage of cabling and space issues. I thought I might be able to work out which motherboards and cpus to get before they were released but guess I'll have to l2b patient and see what new chipsets and boards are released or if they reduce the price of older ones think i've set my heart on this case though: Moneual Moncaso 312 Black HTPC Case little bit pricey but looks the business.
