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Ideal balance of power/performance/budget for HTPC?

rolfharris said:
Guys, guys :D

As previously mentioned - I have no requirement for games, so a graphics card would just bump up the power consumption.

To me I have two choices at the minute. Atom + Ion, or spend a bit more and take the i3 route.

I'm tempted to take the Atom route purely because I can then squeeze it all into a stupidly small mini ITX case and should be OK for my needs and is that bit cheaper.

So I think on balance, my final decision will be the Intel Atom.

I am tempted by the i3 tough and thanks for all your helpful comments.
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Donno about itx AM3 boards but I think I read somewhere that LGA1156 itx boards are due in the next few weeks.
 
Hooa said:
How can you not understand that people can actually end up choosing and being happy with things outside of their initial specifications?
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Hello Hooa,

I agree with what you said about the HTPC, it is quite an ambiguous tech acronym now and can have a variety of meanings, I personally would want a machine to be more multi-purpose than just having the ability to watch films and play music as I need to get more value from my hardware purchases. My view of a HTPC is a Film/Music box, a Home-Server, Cruncher and second Gaming-Machine (I don't do consoles) . . . I guess you could split those functions up into separate machines but I don't see why someone would do that when one machine can do it all! :confused:

I've made up a new name for the modern HTPC/Home-Server/Gaming Rig/Folding unit/Downloader and I call it a Perpetual Pandora's Box . . . it's a low powered 24/7 machine that does everything and IMHO is the logical evolution of the old HTPC concept, all we need now is a IGP/GPU combo that powers down the GPU to 0watts and runs using the onboard IGP when just movie watching and other non 3D-Tasks but powers up the main GPU and lets rip once you start gaming or GPGPU folding etc . . . were getting there slowly but surely! :cool:

Off Topic:

P.S: there are lots of knowledgeable and friendly members here on OcUK forums and I dare say these are the people you want to interact with. If you find one or two people are rude or aggressive with you just let is slide off you like water off a ducks back and don't get pulled off centre . . . every single reply you make in these situations just feeds the fire and has the potential to take an interesting and useful thread and basically wreck it . . .

If anyone makes a personal attack, criticises you personally, uses profanities or any other tactic to provoke an emotional response just try your best to ignore them and hopefully they will get bored and go away . . .

Most of us are here to learn and share information, experiences etc in a nice friendly environment so keep that in mind, it's not perfect all the time as we are all human and sometimes have a bad day but some people just have more bad days than others! :D
 
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Hang on a sec, that's a mini-itx am3 motherboard? Perhaps amd is an alternative after all. You're probably the chap to ask Wayne, where should I look for an overclockable mini-itx amd board?

It would be fair to say I'm looking at putting one of your Pandora's boxes together, and had previously only considered i3. If amd can offer a mini-itx board that I can run from a pico psu I'll be most pleased.
 
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JonJ678 said:
Hang on a sec, that's a mini-itx am3 motherboard?
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Hiya Jon!

Sorry did I post that in the wrong thread? :p

JonJ678 said:
Perhaps amd is an alternative after all
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Of course? . . . is HTPC meaning just miniITX these days? . . . sorry I'm not an expert :o

JonJ678 said:
where should I look for an overclockable mini-itx amd board?
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Walter (WJA96) is your man for esoteric hardware, he also has contacts at J&W . . .

btw Jon, I'm almost scared to ask but can you shed any light on this "Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA over HDMI. Outputting 8-channel LPCM over HDMI?" . . . that means nothing to me at all? is it important? . . . what happens if you don't have that?

I did enter a HTPC thread in the CPU forum but its getting transformed into an HD-Audiophile geek fest! :cool:
 
Hey man. Hypocritical to be considering amd after so recently damning them for being slower I know :p

I don't know much about J&W, but remember reading some damning comments about zotacs 775 board so am looking for non-zotac options really. Google is doing alright so far, power consumption for a stock mini-itx with a 95W processor is around 150W which may be too much for me.

HTPC doesn't mean mini-itx (yet, I think cooling is the main thing stopping these becoming synonyms), my question was selfish. In the near future I'll have to pay electricity bills on top of rent, and the 4ghz i7 running all the time is going to hurt. However I'm impatient, so looking for the greatest performance within 150W (as this is all pico psus can offer). Hence reading this thread, the title struck me as exactly what I'm looking for.

I think true hd audio is 24bit rather than 16, which would be a higher sampling rate so the digital version is a better approximation to the analogue source. Slightly more expensive circuitry, and Dolby will slap a licensing fee on top. 8 channel I'm guessing you've worked out, it's just running 8 speaks with different signals. Sending it over hdmi is wildly popular for reasons I don't understand, as I'd want video going to the screen and audio to an amplifier rather than both going to the screen. Perhaps the cable splits at the far end.

It might be important. I can't tell the difference between a piano and a guitar from the sound (really :( ) so beyond an interest in the electronics, I couldn't care less if I have high definition audio or not :D

Found a seriously glowing thread about J&W, fairly certain I want a board from them next. mini-itx h55 boards don't seem to exist, so am2+ is looking like the way to go. I like the look of the J&W Minix 780-SP128MB specifically, reading a review from someone who I fear to be a competitor in one of the looser senses of the word. The drawback is I have no idea if 780 northbridge, 700 southbridge is good, bad, or irrelevant. There's a 785 nb, 710 sb option, is this better?

edit: Good lord sodimm ddr2 is expensive
 
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The 780G IGP has UVD whereas the 785G has UVD2 meaning the latter has better media decoding abilities.

The SB710 southbridge is essentially a cut down SB750 southbridge from the 790 series motherboards without RAID IIRC.

The SB710 supports ACC unlike the SB600 and SB700 meaning you can unlock disabled cores in AMD CPUs if they are functional.
 
Cheers Cat, that's really helpful. I think that means SB710 is worth seeking out over the SB700. 785 seems to be the Radeon 4200 while the 780 is the 3200, not sure how much difference this makes. It looks like this motherboard would be ideal, but I can't find any trace of it for sale.

5b4hg5.jpg


To my amusement I've just realised this is the same one Wayne linked to above.
 
785G-SP128MB = results. In Australia and Japan.

780G-SP128MB = results on UK websites. Is 785G-SP128MB that much better?


feeddagoat said:
Donno about itx AM3 boards but I think I read somewhere that LGA1156 itx boards are due in the next few weeks.
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There's a DFi Lanparty P55 already out. I don't have one in my hands but it is on sale.

There's an Intel H57 and a Zotac H55 also due out sometime soon.
 
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Much the same results from Google here. Better onboard graphics and the ability to unlock some processors is worth having, though probably not worth importing from Australia. Unsure whether availability will improve with time or not.

As it stands though the 780G costs just over £100 and needs sodimm ram, so it's not looking like a cheaper option than intel. Total cost is probably £300 before chassis, so I'm not sure it works out better than the 775 / future 1156 options.
 
Reminds me.

The Intel and Zotac 1156 itx boards have a more or less central socket. Close to the PCI-e slot.

Since a fair few of these PCI-e slot boards tend to get snaffled by those who want to stuff a substantial graphics card in it and appropriately larger cpu cooler there could be some conflict of interests.

Wonder if designs like the Nexus Low-7000 could scrape in with enough clearance against the card.
 
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Happy i3 user

Just a quick post (my first here) to share my experience with the i3.

Last weekend I upgraded my system using i3 and the Asus EVO micro mobo.

Yes, the mobo is not cheap, but I wanted one that would last a while since I bought OEM Win7 which is married to mobo. USB 3 sold me on this over the cheaper (but very good I read) Gigabyte competitor. (Full size version of the ASUS has raid and AHCI support which I may regret not having - I still haven't optimized things for the Intel SSD I'm booting from - eventually I'll probably have to reinstall OS once I get firmware all updated and understand the best way to run the SSD)

I have an ATI 5770 in there for games but without that "need" I'd use on-board video and would have either built it as small or as silent as possible. Maybe this would have been my first attempt at 100% passive cooling :D

Eventually my workstation will get upgraded with a faster chip and this one I spent 88 quid for will go into a small or silent build. M-ITX possible in the future?

In daily usage, at stock 2.9Ghz this system blows away my [email protected]
Mostly that is the SSD and memory subsystem. The chips should be close but I've seen benchmarks where the i3 beat true quad core even on tasks like video encoding where in theory the true quad should have the edge.

For your purposes you can prob run this thing at stock speed and undervolt it. I had mine running at 4.2 Ghz first day - even then the CPU was cool but my video was putting out a lot of heat. Now I've got airflow fixed in the new case and think I'll be running it around 3.5 Ghz for 24/7. (Still trying to find the right FSB/multiplier combo for a speed in that range that will give my mem a good FSB to work with)

I think this is truly an amazing chip. Perfect for HTPC. Perfect for overclocked gaming rig. Don't worry about having "too much power" : the only negatives for your build are price, heat, and power consumption. I think i3 shines on all of these, but I don't know the AMD side to talk price comparisons.

Good luck with your system!
 
Hotwired said:
785G-SP128MB = results. In Australia and Japan.

780G-SP128MB = results on UK websites. Is 785G-SP128MB that much better?



There's a DFi Lanparty P55 already out. I don't have one in my hands but it is on sale.

There's an Intel H57 and a Zotac H55 also due out sometime soon.
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could have been the H55/57 boards the article mentioned then. Nice one too big wayne! gotta love itx builds, especially for HTPC's.

welcome to the forums too shmiddy. Hope you enjoy your time here =)
 
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Well I'm not quite sure what happened to rolfharris (O.P) :confused:

He either got the help he needed, put in an order and then went back to a normal life . . . or he got blown away by the huge amount of activity, squabbling, talks of Intel boycotts of what not, oh dear! :o

I hope he doesn't mind us using his thread, with a little edit there is still useful bits and bobs in here! :D

I'm interested to get some feedback on how people view/regards a HTPC?

I know a little bit about Intel Atom and a little bit of nVidia ION/ION 2, don't know much about miniITX though! :)

If I had a mate/client who wanted a HTPC and he had limited budget this is what I would use for the System-Core . . . bearing in mind I didn't build a "HTPC" for two years nearly . . .

htpc2010.jpg



If somebody already owned a little sneaky stash of DDR2 that would cost even less! . . . like £90 for a chip/mobo combo! :eek: . . . . anyone care to point out something I've missed here? . . . . apart from that double-whooper-HDMI-by-pass-True-bit-wodgybob! :D

I wanna hear from some of the miniITX crew who are contemplating sourcing esoteric bits of kit from all the four corners of the Earth? . . . I don't see anything wrong with the above? apart from it's a ickle bit bigger? :p

Can a AMD® Sempron™ 140 handle it it? . . . . I don't see why not unless your also doing a bit of cheeky encoding? :cool:
 
I'm sure the OP is reading this and just a little unsure what to say. If you're here do speak up Rolf, this is your thread after all and it's rude of us to derail it so :)

Size is the biggest objection to the above in my mind. I'd like to put a rational argument together based on power consumption, but in truth my reasons for wanting mini-itx aren't very sensible. In short, it's a lot harder to build up a small computer than a large one, and I already have a large water cooled computer. So far I've sourced a radiator, pump, cpu block and a chipset block for a mini-itx system, and have an amd 7750 that could go in an amd board. Not the most sensible order to buy things in I know.

Specifying a computer is a compromise between cost, performance, noise, size, mass. These are interrelated and generally contradictory, e.g. small makes cooling difficult which makes things loud yet small and quiet are both desirable. Mini-itx helps considerably with decreasing size, noise is best dealt with using water cooling which tends to make things bigger, and performance is largely dictated by the processor which is budget and cooling limited. I think the best combination available for a htpc is probably the j&w mini-itx board with an undervolted amd triple core, watercooled, in a case which doesn't appear to exist yet but weighs lots. Turning it into a gaming computer involves finding a suitable graphics card and a bigger psu, which makes things more difficult but would leave you with your pandora's box.

Don't suppose anyone knows of a low profile graphics card, that draws at most 50W, which significantly outperforms onboard graphics? I have a suspicion it doesn't exist
 
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JonJ678 said:
Don't suppose anyone knows of a low profile graphics card, that draws at most 50W, which significantly outperforms onboard graphics? I have a suspicion it doesn't exist
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There are low profile HD4650 cards available (~30W)

I imagine in a few months there may be low proffile 5650 cards too.

Both will be significantly more powerful than even the best onboard gfx
 
If, and only IF, it was purely for videos and music, surely a £100 WDTV Live would suffice?

I have the original WDTV, and think it is a great alternative to a media-only HTPC.
 
Some looking around suggests cards like the 9400 also draw under 30W load, which suggests a htpc can be put together with a passive graphics card that outperforms onboard without power consumption being a problem, which throws the dfi mini-itx p55 board into the mix too. There's quite a lot of options at the moment :)
 
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