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!

Ganesh's Midrange HTPC
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  • prdola0 - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link

    In some of the systems, I would buy a GTX460 1GB instead of the HD6850 simply because most people play in 1920x1200 and lower (I would say 1680x1050 as the most common) and in those resolutions the GTX460 is better than the HD6850. It would be also a choice for the next generation of games, if the consoles ever let it come. Otherwise very nice systems.

    One question though, are all those memories you guys used from QVLs of the motherboards or do you just trust them?

    Thanks a lot,
    Prdola
  • ganeshts - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link

    The components suggested in my mid-range HTPC build are all tried and tested together :)
  • therealnickdanger - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link

    It would be cool if each of these builds was benched and the results were shown... :) I know that's asking a lot, but like Brian said:

    "Heck, there's no reason you can't at least ask for the absolute best..."
  • AnnihilatorX - Saturday, November 20, 2010 - link

    I'd personally go for HD6850. It runs cooler, uses less power, can double up as high quality sound card (if you have a AV receiver with HDMI, Radeon HD68xx support DTS Master HD, etc).
  • prdola0 - Monday, November 22, 2010 - link

    The GTX460 can of course also double up as a high quality soind card. Why wouldn't it?
  • blotto5 - Saturday, November 20, 2010 - link

    for 1680x1050 it does perform better, but not by much. for 1920x1200 there is almost no difference, and for any resolution higher than that the 6850 blows it out of the water. when your have an amd processor and an amd chipset it would make sense to stay on the same platform and get an amd video card, everything plays nice together that way.
  • prdola0 - Monday, November 22, 2010 - link

    Any nVidia graphics card will work just as good on an AMD system as on an Intel system. How did you find that it wouldn't? That's totally false.

    And your statement about no difference in 1920x1200 is only valid for the GTX460 768MB. The 1GB version is actually still better at 1920x1200. According to Steam Survey, 74.2% of players play at 1680x1050 or lower resolution and only 4.19% play at higher resolutions than 1920x1200. I still don't understand why all the reviews focus so much on the 2560x1600 resolution. I wish Ryan didn't ignore that fact in his Final Words. But world isn't perfect :)
  • Quizzical - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link

    If Zambezi isn't going to fit Socket AM3, then someone ought to tell AMD.

    End of page 5 of the AMD codename decoder that they released on financial analyst day:

    “Zambezi”
    Market: Desktop
    What is it? four-, six-, or eight-core 32-nm AM3 socket desktop processor based on
    the “Bulldozer” processor architecture for the enthusiast market.
    Planned for introduction: 1H 2011

    If I give a link, this site apparently flags the comment as spam and disallows it. But you can find it yourself as follows. Do a Google search for "AMD 2010 Financial Analyst Day". Click the (currently) top search result, to a page on AMD's site with that headline. Click the "AMD Codename Decoder" link from that page. The above is a copy and paste from the end of the document.
  • Dustin Sklavos - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link

    Later on in the year they did say they tried to make Bulldozer compatible with the existing AM3 socket but couldn't do it, as a result you get AM3r2, where the motherboards will be backwards compatible with old AM3 chips, but the Bulldozer chips aren't going to be compatible with old AM3 boards.
  • Quizzical - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link

    The information I quoted was released by AMD last week. "Later on in the year" than that would have to be very, very recent. As I said, if the information that AMD just released is wrong, someone should tell them to fix it.

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