Holiday 2010 System Builder's Guide
by AnandTech Staff, edited by Jarred Walton on November 19, 2010 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
- Systems
- Holiday 2010
Alan's Ultimate HTPC: Bringing Total Entertainment to the Living Room
Our final build is for those of you who do not like to compromise with your HTPC. Are you tired of hooking up multiple streaming boxes to get all your internet content, NAS for secondary streamers, and another gaming system as well? There are numerous users out there, myself included, that love HTPC as well as gaming. There are many ways to skin the proverbial HTPC cat; this guide is for those of you who want it all in one box on your big screen. There will be sacrifices however, and those come in the size department and in the old pocket book. If you're looking for a small, quiet HTPC that isn't as powerful but doesn't cost an arm and a leg, go look at what Ganesh is pushing.
| Alan's Ultimate HTPC | ||
| Hardware | Component | Price |
| Processor |
Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition (Thuban 45nm, 3.2GHz, 6x512K L2, 6MB L3, 125W) |
$210 |
| CPU HSF | Noctua NH-D14 | $75 |
| Motherboard | MSI 890FXA-GD70 (AMD 890FX AM3) | $200 |
| Video | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1GB (100281-3SR) | $300 |
| GPU HSF | Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme | $57 |
| TV Tuner | Ceton InfiniTV4 CableCARD Quad-Tuner | $400 |
| Memory |
G.Skill Ripjaws 2x4GB DDR3-1600 CL9 (F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL) |
$150 |
| OS Drive (SSD) | OCZ Vertex 2 120GB ($20 MIR) | $210 |
| Misc | Icy Dock MB882SP-1S-1B | $20 |
| Hard Drives | 3 x Western Digital Green 2TB (WD20EARS) | $300 |
| Optical Drive | LG UH10LS20 Blu-ray Combo Drive | $85 |
| Case | Lian Li PC-X2000F | $300 |
| Power Supply | Seasonic SS-560KM 560W (80 Plus Gold) ($15 MIR) | $115 |
| Mouse | Razer Mamba | $110 |
| Keyboard | Logitech diNovo Edge | $157 |
| Software | Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (OEM) | $135 |
| Software | Hipporemote Pro | $5 |
| Software | PowerDVD 10 Ultra | $90 |
| Misc | Powermat for iPhone 3GS (PMM-1PB-B2A) | $41 |
| Total System Price | $3015 | |
The first thing to look at for an HTPC is the case, and the most important feature in the case of an HTPC is noise. This is the major problem with multipurpose machines. Gaming cases tend to stay cool but also tend to be noisy and filled with enough LEDs to be mistaken for a flight beacon; after all gamers tend to want to highlight all their high-end hardware. Finding components that will both be cool enough for gaming and quiet enough for a home theater is the key here. A great best of both worlds case is the Lian Li PC-X2000F. At $299 from Newegg as of this writing, the case is pricey, but it currently sports a $200 saving (though that may disappear soon). At that price, I think it is an excellent buy for a home theater/gaming enthusiast.
New to this version is USB 3.0 support and a redesigned case layout. With five 140mm fans, dust filters, and anti vibration solutions, the air-cooling is both highly effective and extremely quiet. Sporting seven HDD bays with the installed back plates for hot-swappable fun, this case has plenty of room for media drives; just make sure your motherboard or RAID card have enough SATA connectors.
Speaking of storage, currently 2TB WD20EARS drives are shipping for $100 and are a great way to expand your media storage capabilities and tend to run on the quiet side of things—no need for a NAS when your HTPC case holds enough traditional HDDs to feed every other device in your home with media! The case is limited to 3.5" drives, but throwing your favorite SSD into an Icy Dock or similar device will allow you to push it right into one of the HDD back plates to get your OS and applications loading at high speed with no noise whatsoever.
For the GPU, I chose AMD because of the bitstreaming support for HD audio codecs. We can argue about performance with the 5870 and 6870, but the 5870 has been around enough that aftermarket cooling solutions are readily available. Add a Noctua cooler to your favorite CPU as well as an Arctic Cooler Accelero on your high-end AMD graphics card for cool and quiet gaming that won't leave you straining to hear during quiet movie scenes. We've also selected a high-efficiency, near-silent 560W power supply from Seasonic to keep everything running; the GPU + CPU combination generally means we need more power than a typical HTPC, but since this is the main feature of the Home Theater/Gaming we went higher end.
At this point, we've taken your NAS or Windows Home Server, HTPC, and gaming PC and combined them into one glorious entertainment system. You'll need help accessing all that media however. Free applications like Boxee and My Movies 3 can help sort local and internet content past what Windows Media Center offers, but pay applications like PowerDVD will integrate well with Media Center and will also play nice with My Movies adding Blu-ray capability into the mix. But there's still more….
The smartphone is one of the best ways I have found to control a Windows-based HTPC. With HippoRemote on your phone and HippoVNC booting on your PC, you can use your smartphone to seamlessly open Windows Media Center, Boxee, Hulu, or myriad other applications. The touchscreen on the phone then transforms into a remote interface designed for the application of your choice. It is a great way to navigate seamlessly between applications that bring you internet or media content without having to browse endless webpages, and there's no need to hack Media Center. The problem is, using your smartphone in this manner depletes the battery at a rapid rate; that's why adding a Powermat on the coffee table will address this problem and charge your smartphone/remote each time you set it down. You'll still want a good wireless mouse as well as a keyboard for gaming. I like the Razer Mamba mouse, while the Logitech Dinovo Mini or Edge are excellent options for the keyboard.
Last but not least, you can add cable TV into your HTPC with a Ceton InfiniTV 4 CableCARD tuner. Although quite expensive and backordered, they bring four simultaneous HD streams into your PC through a single card. Streams can be accessed in other rooms via the Xbox 360, or by adding a network bridge to the tuners (a process still in beta firmware, but it should be available by the time the cards are out of backorder). Or, if you're one of those looking to cut the cable, save $400 and stick with streaming video.
You can see my list of components up top, but play around with what works best for you. I went with an AMD setup to keep the cost slightly lower and chose a single GPU as the system will likely be hooked to an HDTV that will limit the resolution for gaming to 1920x1080. Sadly, the single most expensive item is the CableCARD tuner. But for around $3000, you'll be ripping Blu-rays onto 6TB of storage, controlling your media with your phone, and playing the latest games on your 1080p TV. Enjoy!
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
112 Comments
View All Comments
StormyParis - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
htpc should fit into a stereo cabinet. you're trying to build a NAS + HTPC + desktop into one machine, which makes no sense at all. Split the thing in 3, with a real, small, silent HTPC, a NAS, and a mini-itx desktop, and you're much better off, for pretty much the same price.ajlueke - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
While it is somewhat a matter of personal preference, I admit, some people really hate giant cases in the living room. I love having everything built into one system, and using it to serve the rest of the house and play Starcraft II on the big screen. The real downside, is then you are using a high end rig to serve you other computers as opposed to a NAS, and a NAS is going to have far superior numbers in the power consumption department.Mathieu Bourgie - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
Good job on the builds everyone, great idea of getting several members of the AT's team to work together on this.Here are my opinions, suggestions and things that I'd personally change:
Dustin's AMD Pure Budget System:
Hard Drive: Actually, if you shop on Amazon instead, you can snap a Spinpoint F3 500Gb for about $46 and a 1TB for $53, without needing to find any coupons.
Power Supply: I'd mention that the Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D 380W doesn't include a power cord in its package. Not a big deal for most of us, but still good to knowi f you don't have a spare cord.
DVD Burner: Why go with an IDE based model, which is out of stock by the way? Because the motherboard comes with a single SATA and a single IDE cable? Hardly a reason if you ask me.
Might as well get a SATA model that can be used for years and years, if you upgrade the system down the road. Going by customer's feedback on NewEgg, ASUS 24x SATA DVD Burner is one of the most reliable model available, for only $20: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Balraj's Intel Budget System:
The one stick of RAM is an interesting trade off, sure you lose dual-channel but you gain the ability to easily upgrade RAM down the road. Then again, a motherboard with 4 RAM slots would allow for both options.
Blu-Ray: The Samsung SH-B083L/BSBP has pretty bad reviews on NewEgg, I'd get the Samsung SH-B123L instead, which costs $20 more, but is also faster (12x vs 8x).
Power Supply: I cannot skip this: you really want to avoid using a low-end, generic power supply, for reliability purposes and to protect your components. You do not want to cut corners on a power supply.
Jarred's AMD Budget Gaming System:
You mention Crossfire support, but go with a motherboard that has the PCI-Express 16x slots running at 16x and 4x, which would bottleneck performance?
For a similar price, the ASRock 870 EXTREME3 comes with two PCI-Express 16x slots at 8x/8x, which are well spaced to allow both cards to "breath".
125W CPU, with a stock cooler? Sure, it's "adequate" for cooling in most cases, but that stock cooler is going to be heard from miles away when you game for hours and/or during hot summer nights if you don't have an AC. Not much of an issue if you play with headphones, but still, I'd get at least a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler.
"Gaming depends primarily on your GPU" "You could even go with a cheaper CPU like the Athlon II X4 645 or the Phenom II X4 810"
Agreed for most games, but there are games that will be CPU bound (Think RTS like SC2, or MMORPG like WoW), where you'll want a powerful CPU that allow the GPU to flex its muscles.
Also, while the X4 645 isn't a bad CPU, losing the L3 cache and the lower frequencies are going to hurt performance quite a bit for video games.
Vivek's Midrange Intel System:
Once again, Crossfire is mentioned, but the second PCI-Express slot runs at 4x...
An ASRock P55 EXTREME4 will fix that and if you want USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0Gb/s at the same time as Crossfire 8x/8x, you'll want an ASUS P7P55D-E Pro, which features a PLX chip, making it one of the few P55 boards that can run SATA 6.0Gb/s, USB 3.0 and Crossfire 8x/8x all at once, unlike most boards where USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0Gb/s will fall back to USB 2.0 and SATA 3.0Gb/s due to the lack of bandwidth (lack of PCI-Express lanes, thanks to the P55 chipset).
PSU: OCZ don't exactly make the most reliable PSUs, with the biggest issue being that reliability varies from a model to another, since they use various manufacturers for their PSUs. You get what you pay for with a PSU and a solid Corsair or Seasonic PSU will serve you much better IMO.
Raja's Midrange AMD Overclocking System:
I actually agree with all your choices and like how you didn't strictly stick to NewEgg. Way to go.
Raja's Midrange Intel Overclocking System:
I'd avoid the ASUS Maximus III GENE like the plague. I used to recommend it, until I'd hear back from so many readers that had issues with it (Read some review on NewEgg) that I had no choice but to stop recommending it, because it's so unreliable.
Ryan's High-End Gaming System:
Way to go for keeping noise somewhat under control. Once again though, an IDE DVD Burner in a 2k+ system? Really?
Also, the sound card is priced at $100, not $75, unless I missed something here.
Brian's Intel Dream PC:
Hahaha, now you're talking! Couldn't agree more on the motherboard, which is a one of a kind.
Just one thing though: You forgot CPU Coolers, since Xeon CPUs don't come with any.
Also, why ECC RAM? ECC seems kind of futile for a Gaming PC.
Keyboard: Yes! Mechanical keyboards are the best. I personally recently got a Filco with MX Cherry Blue switches and that keyboard helped me increase my WPM typing speed tremendously. The feedback and noise is also great for gaming.
Mouse: I've always been a fan of the Logitech MX-518, which remains excellent years after its release and offers a great bang for your buck too.
Don't have much to add to the HTPCs, they make sense and quite frankly, it's a matter of personal tastes too.
Except for a few things mentioned above, great job all on the builds. Although I'm a bit sadden to not have seen any Workstation build.
P.S. For those who wonder about my experience building PCs and the like, I’m a computer enthusiast with 10 years of experience in building, fixing and modifying computers, who has been writing about/offering PC Builds of all kinds (Gaming, HTPC, Workstations, etc.) at various price points on my own blog (www.hardware-revolution.com) for over two years and a half now.
Cheers,
Mathieu
Ben90 - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
I agree completely on the inclusion of a mechanical keyboard, they are the SSDs of the keyboard world. Once you try to type on rubber domes again it feels absolutely horrible.Personally I am a Cherry Black guy as I like the linear travel for gaming, but for typing its impossible to beat Cherry Blues unless quietness is a metric.
bji - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
How do you feel about scissor switch keyboards? I like them as I find them to be much less mushy than rubber dome keyboards, but alot quieter and with less key travel than mechanical keyboards. I use the Kensington "Slim Type Keyboard" (that's what it says on the bottom, I can't remember the exact model number) and highly recommend it.Tom_S - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
Concerning keyboards etc. I *have* been living under a rock and had not heard of the DAS keyboard that sounds interesting, but while under the rock I have been using my Northgate and Avant keyboards (made by CVT Inc) which were always the gold standard in mechanical keyboards. I looked at the site, and it appears that the lesser of the Avant kbds is not available right now, but the Stellar is.http://www.cvtinc.com/products/keyboards/menu.htm
I concede that these are old fashioned - not USB without an adapter, no USB hub, but they have been around since the 1980's and are noteworthy. To further date myself, one of their features has been to remap the left ctrl and caps lock keys (moving ctrl next to the "a" key), for those of us still used to old terminals and editors/programming environments that use control keys.
strikeback03 - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
Are the current Samsung HDDs any good? A couple years ago I bought a Samsung HDD recommended on this site for a build for work. First one wouldn't allow an OS install. RMAed it, got a replacement. That one died a few months later. RMAed that, bought one from another brand, and after testing the third Samsung to be sure it could be formatted when we got it just kept it on the side for emergency use. Can't say I'm anxious to try again.Mathieu Bourgie - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
Samsung HDDs are some of the best drives on the market in my opinion. Their F3 and F4 (The 7,200 rpm 320GB model that is) line-up offer some of the best throughputs rates in MB/s, are very reliable and emit very little heat.For the average latency time, the Western Digital drives tend to be better, although they run hotter and have slightly lower reliability. For Gaming, I'd say that WD drives are the best, but quite frankly, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a system equipped with Samsung or WD drives.
Also, keep in mind warranty: W.D. offers 5 years on their Black Caviar line-up, as opposed to 3 years on their Caviar Blue and 3 years for Samsung drives.
JarredWalton - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
I did try to price-check everything using our internal pricing tools (Dynamite-Data is an AnandTech affiliate of sorts), so where I could find clearly better prices from other than Newegg I went that route. Obviously, 10 systems or whatever makes it a bit difficult to get every little detail, which is why some IDE DVDRW drives slipped in. Oops!The CrossFire/SLI issue on lower end motherboards (i.e. P55 with x16/x4) was another one that I wracked my brain on for a good long time. I'd really like to go the Biostar route on Vivek's setup (or the overclocking board), but truthfully I'm a bit gun-shy with Biostar. I've had decent boards in the past from them, and other boards that sucked hard. Price is another item that I kept running into -- I don't want to recommend an expensive Intel board when SB is coming so soon.
I'll try to go through and update the optical drives to be SATA, though. Shame on my fellow writers for being so lazy! :-) Thanks for the comments.
JarredWalton - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
Okay, I made some updates and added some additional commentary where appropriate. But I chose to disagree (or let the editors disagree at least) with some of your comments. IMO, there's no need for aftermarket cooling on CPUs if you don't intend to overclock, so I left my build without one.The other big issue is Newegg reviews; they're just not reliable by any stretch. We've had motherboards that our guys loved that get mediocre scores at Newegg because of idiot users. "Gee... my memory isn't working and I plugged it in, never looked at the BIOS, never updated the BIOS. What's wrong with this board!?" Likewise, some items get 5 eggs not because they're the best but because a lot of buyers think they're a great value... and they wouldn't know quality if it walked up and punched them in the nose. So, while I generally avoid stuff that gets 3 eggs or less, the 4/5 egg stuff may be decent, good, or great depending on the user. Plus, people with problems are about 10X more likely to post as people where everything worked fine.
Anyway, thanks for the corrections/suggestions.