A Budget Home Theater & PC Setup: 4K, HDR, UHD Blu-ray, and More
by Ganesh T S on December 26, 2017 8:30 AM ESTUHD Blu-ray Playback in Action
Prior to testing out HDR UHD Blu-ray playback using the TCL 55P607 and the Denon AVR X3400H, we did a trial run with the LG 43UD79-B monitor. The playback was flawless in SDR mode. Emboldened by these results, we moved the hardware to the home theater setup. At that time, the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update was yet to be released. Intel and CyberLink had adopted their own scheme to activate HDR in full screen mode while playing back HDR-enabled titles. Unfortunately, the TCL 55P607 (on firmware version 7.7.0 at that time) did not really like the mode switch.
Corrupted HDR Display with TCL 55P607 Firmware v7.7
I reached out to both Intel and TCL with the above results. While the latter simply washed their hands off the issue, Intel was very responsive. They went to the extent of even sourcing the same display to check at their end. Around the same time, TCL released a firmware update (v8.0.0 4127-30) that resolved the problem.
By the time I was able to upgrade my TV, Windows 10 Fall Creators Update had released and Intel's 4877 driver had also become public. My next testing round had interesting results. The 4877 driver had flawless desktop and streaming HDR, but, playing back the Planet Earth II title resulted in a BSOD, or a PowerDVD crash, or a message indicating that PowerDVD was denied access to the graphics hardware. With an older driver version (4771), I was able to play back the Blu-ray with HDR, but, had no desktop or streaming HDR.
On checking with Intel again, it became evident that the issue was specific to the Planet Earth II title. They provided me with early access to a driver slated for release in January 2018. This driver enabled both the Intel NUC7i7BNHX and the ASRock Beebox-S 7200U to successfully play back the Planet Earth II Blu-ray with HDR, while also performing as per specifications in our other tests detailed in the previous sections.
Note that the Pioneer BDR-211UBK comes with an OEM version of PowerDVD 14 that does support 4K UHD Blu-ray playback.
We tracked the power consumption of the set (PC + Blu-ray drive with the SATA-USB bridge) while playing the first chapter of the first disc in the Blu-ray set (after a full menu loop).
We find that the Beebox-S 7200U is more power efficient for this particular task. The NUC7i7BNHX is much more versatile with its Thunderbolt 3 ports, Optane support, and other bells and whistles. Can those make a difference in a generic HTPC setup? We will address that in our concluding section.
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rapster - Sunday, December 31, 2017 - link
Definitely. My media cabinet alone was $3k and is the budget option compared to the built-in at my last house. I really don’t get the budget complaints unless we’re dealing with kids, and thought the piece addressed quite a few things that caused me grief. Wish I read it before my last build.ganeshts - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Most speakers were re-used from my previous setup, and as such, not a part of the initial purchase list. I assume most users who upgrade can reuse existing speakers. I provided a suggestion in the concluding section.NeatOman - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
I'm still content with my current setup of a plasma connected via HDMI 4:4:4 and true 8-bit to a Pentium G6950/H57/4GB w/60GB SSD that's as quiet as a cat fart. The sound IMO hasn't improved much at all unless you are going full ATMOS, my 10+ year old setup is "limited" by 5.1 96k/24-bit audio :-/ (limited by the human ear as well lol) and the speakers (that cost under a few hundred dollars) haven't really gotten any better in the last 10+ years despite what people claim (marginal at best).Plasma still has better colors than the newest quantum/nando/hyper whatever LCD/LED TV's, although due to light/color bleed either from the panel itself or just having the lights on it's blacks aren't as good on my 6+ year old Plasma. And since i only use it for movies there still isn't any noticable burn in.
But I'm definitely going to replace the PC with something Intel powered that can handle HDR10 and 4K streaming (DRM) that i believe is anything iX-7xxx and up when i get a proper OLED TV.
beisat - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Netflix on PC is never 24p - neither on Edge nor UWP App...just keep that in mind if you ever consider using a htpc on a tv...Orange14 - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
I agree with others as to some of these setups not qualifying as budget HTPCs. In addition, the major fault is to assume that nobody runs cablecard tuners anymore. In my case, I still watch a fair amount of sports that requires such a set up. I've been building my own HTPCs for over five years now in a variety of different configurations. Unless one really needs the setup for gaming, the hardware requirements are modest.euskalzabe - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
I'm so surprised to not even see a mention of Windows 10's horrendous HDR support. I use a HDR10 supporting TV as a monitor, with a GTX 1060, and the second I enable HDR on the desktop everything looks awfully washed out. Many have commented on this problem online forums. Sadly HDR on Windows 10 is, currently, unusable.Aikouka - Wednesday, December 27, 2017 - link
If you enable HDR in the resolution options in Windows, it will leave HDR on *at all times*. The problem is that it makes *no attempts* to adjust the content. So, it will effectively display SDR content in HDR, which doesn't turn out well. Although, I didn't notice nearly as many issues on my Sony TV as I did on my TCL TV (the Best Buy variant of the one in the this article, the P605). I wonder if that's due to the Sony TV's features including adjusting SDR content to try to make it look more like HDR?reiggin - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Not to pile on for the sake of piling on, but as others have said, this article just doesn't meet the stated objective of the headline. It's not a budget setup. It actually fails on two points -- it's neither "budget" nor "setup." To imply that it is a setup would imply that it's fully baked out. It's missing several crucial pieces of info on the speakers/audio quality (only noting the receiver and a set of surrounds is missing so much detail). And it's also missing basic details on how the whole system is configured, intended use, impressions other than technical ones, etc.All in all, this article really disappoints. It's subpar on the quality I've come to expect from Anandtech. There are glaring typos throughout that should be caught with a basic spell check. The structure of the article itself seems to bounce around. Heck, even the introductory first page just seems to be a hot mess.
I think in the end the best (admittedly unsolicited) advice that I could give is to just leave the home theater reviews to AVSForums or some other more experienced site and instead stick to reviews of individual hardware components.
Chyll2 - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Subpar article. I rather see this in a personal blog not in this site. One of the worst "budget" article I saw in a whilemr_tawan - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
On the HTPC front, I guess you went for Core i5 HTPC just for SGX that's required by PowerDVD. It looks like all 7th gen Core CPU supports SGX (unlike Skylake which the lower bound is Core i5), so maybe Core i3 NUC works as well in this regard?