Ideal balance of power/performance/budget for HTPC?

[Hotwired]

The best low power low profile at the moment is the GT220 with DDR3, better than the 4650, worse than the 4670.

However while a 4650 is about £40, a GT220 is about £60. Before P&P.

The best low profile is the dam-hard-to-get-hold-of Sparkle 9800GT but forget about the low power bit and unlike the others it insists on two slots for its cooling, it has a single slot bracket but the heatsink is wider than that :/

 

[JonJ678]

I've gone searching, and discovered that Dell make a laptop style power brick called "DA-2", seems to be a few varieties of it. It offers 6A at 12V on three wires for 18A in total and behaves nicely with the 150W pico psu. Wiring two of the 12V lines to the pico psu and the third to the 4 pin cpu socket apparently works. Source

Alternatively you could run the third line to the graphics card. It's uncertain what fraction of power the graphics card draws from the board and what fraction from the peg cable, a few examples put it at roughly 50:50. This would allow a 9800gt if you were so inclined. Or a better cpu. Either way it's good news, 200W of silent power can't be bad.

 

[Big.Wayne]

Hello Jon,

I just wanted to go through some points you made . . .

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

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I kinda got the size thing, some people want something small and tiny but I question the actual logic of this sometimes. Having jumped into the uATX form factor back in 2008 I believe my reasons were very similar to yours, I wanted to try my hand at something different and the uATX form factor looked suitable for my first HTPC build . . .

One of the problems I had myself was sourcing components and getting them to fit together, I came unstuck with the 2.5" laptop drives I was using as there wasn't really anyway to attach them to the one or two cases i had in mind, I wrote a letter to the antec designers and asked them if they would please start incorporating some way to attach 2.5" drives to their standard chassis.

Going back to the size thing, for people trying to incorporate a computer into a very limited space (like a car or a cockpit) seem to have some logical reason for decreasing size but even then the difference between uATX and miniATX is not that great?

If you doing it just for the challenge I get it . . if your doing it to demonstrate your superior integration skills to yourself and the rest of us I get it, although from personal experience the only skills I think are shown here is how to get certain hardware before it reaches mass market including importing expensive items from another country . . .

If people just want miniITX because they just want miniITX I can say no more . . . I don't see the draw myself but that is why I am asking all these questions in case I have missed something?

That's too points raised now that I am having problems getting my head around

1. Building a machine to serve a single purpose when it could serve many?
2. Building a machine based on miniITX when uATX would work just as well?

point #1 just seems wasteful and point #2 seems expensive ££

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

well I guess we need to get my earlier points out the way first but in what scenario could the space saving between uATX and miniATX be termed "Considerable"?

I'm looking to "get it" here with miniITX, it has also caught my eye but the options are limited and the prices are higher . .

Also I think bundling miniITX and water cooling into the same paragraph is oxymora surely?

I'm not sure what info you have on the latest AMD tech or how much experience you have of a wide range of computer hardware but from my own limited experience I have been *amazed* at how cool the new AMD® Athlon™ II processor and 'AMD® 785G chipset runs, I enclose a screenshot of an undervolted AMD® Athlon™ II X3 triple core that's been folding for a few days . . . passively cooled by a ThermoLab baram . . .

Now fair enough, even though that is being *passively* cooled by a premium heatsink I have very little doubt in my mind that you could achieve very similar results using a basic cooler, once you start working with a dual core or mono core chip the heat output only gets less and less, this will be an intersting cooler for an AMD HTPC build although I'm guessing the supplied AMD stock cooler (without fan) would work just as well . .

Akasa AK-CC032 Low Profile Passive CPU Cooler

£4.99 inc

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

well the whole mini-ITX point has just passed me by obviously but I really need to know where Water-Cooling fits into any of this? . . . as seen above the chips really do not need extra cooling?

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

Indeed, I have been kicking up a fuss over graphics cards power consumption for years but once again AMD heeded my plees and released the Evergreen series! . . the only problem now is I can't afford one hehe!

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

In what context are you using "significantly outperforms onboard graphics" Jon? . . . are you meaning gaming or something else?

ATI Radeon™ HD 4200 Series Specifications here

 

[JonJ678]

I think atx is almost dead now, the number of components integrated onto the board is so high that it's genuinely difficult to think of four things that need to be plugged into the expansion slots, let alone seven. Boards like the X58 Asus Gene (and it's precurser, the G35 Asus P5E-VM which was my first real motherboard) have demonstrated that smaller boards can overclock as well as the large ones, and that you can still fit mad numbers of sockets onto the board. I have a UD5 solely because I was sick of Asus, wanted to try Gigabyte and they hadn't realised a m-atx board. So I think it's reasonable to say that there is no good reason to buy atx over m-atx anymore.

However a similar argument doesn't apply to mini-itx. It's small enough that compromises must be made (e.g. sodimm ram), a single expansion slot isn't enough for most people, few sell so cost is high, and a lot of the big names are completely ignoring them. If mini-itx will ever make sense, it doesn't now, so I think I agree with your reluctance.

The benefits are few. They are a bit smaller. That's actually about it, and I agree that generally there's a lot of space under a desk to hide a full tower or two. However if it's possible to get the same performance from a smaller box, that's always going to appeal on some level. Primarily though I want to design and build a chassis. I think all the rest is just a thin excuse to blow my student loan on sheet metal and cut my hands to oily bits. Still, if the end result is a computer that I can leave on 24/7 without electricity bills cruxifying me, that might eventually pay for the cost in metalwork. Mini-itx makes this more interesting, and also critically makes all the pieces smaller so I've got less to cut. However cooling a mini-itx chassis quietly is difficult. Your temperatures are so good because you have a lot of airflow going through a large heatsink. If I make the box small, airflow becomes real problem, and pumping water around it is essentially cheating. Instead of directing airflow I just put tubing to anything that I think might get hot, it's loads easier. That's my attempt at describing why I want to try mini-itx, I fear it may be incoherent.

1. Building a machine to serve a single purpose when it could serve many?
2. Building a machine based on miniITX when uATX would work just as well?

This will probably be the missus' machine (her laptop is dying), and she'll like it more if it's smaller (she's thoroughly unimpressed by the very loud and quite large Omega I leave folding overnight). It's also my attempt at a low power build, in order to be able to leave it running for long periods of time. As such it has to deal with whatever the lady asks it to do, which will probably feature the sims 3 etc, and I want it to be fast because otherwise I'll just run my i7 computer all the time and never use it myself. But then, I'm not putting a htpc together as such, I just think a lot of the design specification overlaps for each. uATX/m-atx would indeed do much the same job, though I think it would actually cost more (lots more aluminium in a bigger case), but I've never owned a mini-itx board and so it's new and exciting.

Watercooling comes in solely because I think it'll be a lot easier to deal with the heat in a small case if I use this. I have to fit a radiator, which sucks as far as reducing size goes, but I'll be able to cool all the components with a couple of slowly spinning fans however little attention I pay to airflow through the case. If it starts to look like this is a foolish idea, I'll just put the radiator and pump into my current computer. Plus I like watercooling.

You've caught me as far as graphics cards go, I have no idea what I'd want there. I would like an nvidia card because I'm used to their drivers, and because I think cuda is very exciting and likely to be useful at some point. It will also occupy the expansion slot which will otherwise irritate me. However I've put very little thought into this, it's more likely to be a case of setting it up using onboard graphics and if it turns out I have 50W free or so, putting a card in so that if it's ever asked to play a basic game, it doesn't fall flat on its face.

Thanks for your reply Wayne, you're keeping me thinking and I'm grateful for this.

 

[Hotwired]

I've gone searching, and discovered that Dell make a laptop style power brick called "DA-2", seems to be a few varieties of it. It offers 6A at 12V on three wires for 18A in total and behaves nicely with the 150W pico psu. Wiring two of the 12V lines to the pico psu and the third to the 4 pin cpu socket apparently works. Source

Alternatively you could run the third line to the graphics card. It's uncertain what fraction of power the graphics card draws from the board and what fraction from the peg cable, a few examples put it at roughly 50:50. This would allow a 9800gt if you were so inclined. Or a better cpu. Either way it's good news, 200W of silent power can't be bad.

Sounds like too much cost to get a hot graphics card into a small case with bad ventilation. Two 150W picos plus a laptop brick plus the 9800.

The ITX case I decided on packs a 220W internal power supply, can't fit a fat (and long) card like the 9800GT LP so no matter but it has got enough to power a decent cpu plus a couple of drives and a low end card.

I got fed up with seeing itx cases with 60-75W internal or external power supplies and hunted one with a real power supply down. Somehow it also managed to be one of the smallest.

 

[craptakular]

I would go with a Sempron 140 or AMD Athlon II X2 with a 785G motherboard or a Nvidia 9300 motherboard with a Celeron dual core or an E5000 series dual core.

I have a Sempron 140 and nvidia 8200 Asus board in my HTPC, plays blu-rays and mkv great!

£25 cpu sempron 140 owns!! why spend £100 on a cpu when you can get away with using a £25 one?

 

[Big.Wayne]

I have a Sempron 140

Nice one!

Any chance you could chuck us a screenie using the latest CPU-z build please! . . . when you have time of course, I'm also keen to know about the temps and what cooling you are using!

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have a Sempron 140 and nvidia 8200 Asus board in my HTPC, plays blu-rays and mkv great!

£25 cpu sempron 140 owns!! why spend £100 on a cpu when you can get away with using a £25 one?

Because a £100 CPU will be faster at playing Blu-Ray than a £25 one!!

 

[TALON1973]

i dont post much on these debates as i find it useless and timewasting ......but i will say . going from an old gaming set-up that served me well for id say 5 years from when abour enemy territory came out ( 2003 ) i moved to a media centre build for basically blu-ray and "if" i wanted tp soem old gaming . i wasnt expecting modern gamign with what i got and i'm more than happy with the components i bought.

i asked for advice from this very site more than once over many months before i finally got the parts i wanted. i wasnt in a major rush and bought things as i could afford them. ive now ened up with a build i like and whiel i cant get the remote part of it working 9 sighs ) as a blu ray player and low spec gaming machine for some old spec games i'm more than happy.

this site is a VERY good community forum and i would liek to thank others that posted in questions i asked .. at the end of the day i made the choice myself after some input from others on here. each person is entitled to an opinion and while there are some fanboys ( i buy what i like ) , everyone comes on here for a reason ............FOR HELP

i bought what i bought ... ive been on this site a number of years and post from time to time and give my view ... and as opinions .. guys just enjoy what you got

 

[Big.Wayne]

i dont post much on these debates as i [have found] it useless and timewasting ......

Good to see you back TALON1973 and while you may not have found the debates here very satisfying in the past we are currently attempting to raise the bar and leave the old days of petty squabbling behind us! Slowly but surely there are a few notable people from around the world tuning in to OcUk forums, you would be suprised! . . . any thread that descends into name calling and what not just lowers people perceptions of our great forums!

Btw: is the system in your sig the system you are speaking about? . . . you have the same mobo/memory combo as me!

Are you using the IGP for old-school games or did you plug in a GPU?

 

[TALON1973]

yeah my sig is my current set-up

quite surprise how good it is tbh ... i dont game much these days ... but i'm more than happy for what it does. its a media build ... and it does what it says on the tin

 

[Big.Wayne]

Hey Jon,

just whizzing through your post, sorry to chop it up but your posting style is very concentrated, did you go to the same forum-posting academy as drunkenmaster?

I think atx is almost dead now, the number of components integrated onto the board is so high that it's genuinely difficult to think of four things that need to be plugged into the expansion slots, let alone seven

I think so too . . . at least in the consumer space. Having said that SLI/Tri-SLI/Quad-SLI and Cross-fire/Tri-Fire/Quad-Fire still require a standard ATX board but I don't suppose that market is very big . . .

I gather there is still a negative perception about the uATX form factor floating about with the uninformed, it's believed to be substandard and a few people think there is no place to plug in a descreet GPU?

Boards like the X58 Asus Gene (and it's precurser, the G35 Asus P5E-VM which was my first real motherboard) have demonstrated that smaller boards can overclock as well as the large ones

The P5E-VM was your first proper motherboard! . . . that means ums . . . oh my god your a nOOb!

Hehe only joking, but you seem like you been in the PC hardware scene a lot longer? . . . I guess you are involved in some area of expertise that is a bit similar? . . . sometime when you make complicated posts I get nOObed out, I don't speak much nerdish myself! . . . Interesting enough my first *uATX* board was the G31 Asus P5KPL-VM which was the poor mans version of the board you had! . . . wasn't too shabby actually, nice BIOS and whatnot, only VGA though so I plugged in a low power RADEON HD 3450 with HDMI, £80 all in I think?

Primarily though I want to design and build a chassis. I think all the rest is just a thin excuse to blow my student loan on sheet metal and cut my hands to oily bits

Cool, I saw some (sketchup?) images you posted in Phenomics thread, impressive, dunno how hard that is too do but I can't do it so kudos lol!

I think I may well tapping-you-up in the distant future for some help with that stuff, I've always wanted to design some cases but never got past the MDF stages. Sadly I haven't had much metalwork experience, back many years ago when I was at school I didn't find the metal-work lessons very interesting, we things like plum-blobs and ladle's . . . I managed to persuade the teachers to let me skive and I was allowed to do extra guitar/music lessons instead!

Anyway It's interesting that your thinking of designing and building your own chassis, I dare say you could offload a few beta attempts in the Members-Market!

Your temperatures are so good because you have a lot of airflow going through a large heatsink

Well to be fair the set-up is housed in an Antec 300 so it's not all cramped up but I do have just a single quiet 120mm intake and a single quiet 140mm exhaust. I've learnt quite a bit about airflow vs thermal runaway over the years and in my mind it would be possible to design and build a uATX chassis that's cooled by a single fan . . . probably 180mm or something large and slow, I'm sure you could come up with something fanless but a single large fan supplying positive air-pressure would keep everything running really sweet and in relative silence!

This will probably be the missus' machine (her laptop is dying), and she'll like it more if it's smaller (she's thoroughly unimpressed by the very loud and quite large Omega I leave folding overnight).

Yeah I noticed that members of the fairer sex very do pick up on things like noise . . . so it's probably too easy a solution for you just to buy her a new net-top (atom) . . . but she likes to game though right? (sims 3)

It's also my attempt at a low power build, in order to be able to leave it running for long periods of time. As such it has to deal with whatever the lady asks it to do, which will probably feature the sims 3 etc, and I want it to be fast because otherwise I'll just run my i7 computer all the time and never use it myself.

I see, I tried my first low power build using that ASUS board above aiming to get a system that ran ay 100watts max, this was during the period where the most forum members were running their Kentsfield Quads @ 3.6GHz 1.55vCore!

I did try to draw their attention to the power-draw but I didn't get a lot of love, the flames ranged from "Get Out You Hippy!" to "Don't Lecture Me!" etc etc . . . Of course that was a big lesson for me in how to express an opinion the right way!

I've never owned a mini-itx board and so it's new and exciting.

Haha, I'll give you the new bit but "exciting" is just a reminder of the dangers of Nerdom . . . I sometimes find myself getting excited about similar things . . .we are SAD!

You've caught me as far as graphics cards go, I have no idea what I'd want there. I would like an nvidia card because I'm used to their drivers, and because I think cuda is very exciting and likely to be useful at some point

Yeah I agree the nVidia CUDA tech is quite interesting, only know a little about it but saw how its performs in Folding@home and also a program called Badaboom, I found it quite a useful little program but a lot of people say its poop? . . . I think once I got my head around GPGPU was when I first realised the CPU may be doomed!

It will also occupy the expansion slot which will otherwise irritate me

Are you saying that if you don't have a card to fit into the one single empty slot on the board you will be itchy? . . . haha . . . I used to be just like that myself!

Thanks for your reply Wayne, you're keeping me thinking and I'm grateful for this

No problem at all, it makes a nice change to have some general chatter and bounce ideas back and forth. I will be interested to see how you get on but I am wondering if you are perhaps making life a lot harder for yourself by having everything so challenging? . . . If I had your design and metal work skills I would be getting a swish uATX design together with cooling based around one single intake fan with enough venting/mesh-design for air to escape, but of course thats me and this is you! . . . good luck, gotta go as I have the Intel® legal department mounting an offensive against me for the 4p thread, gotta go and study up a bit more latin!

 

[JonJ678]

just whizzing through your post, sorry to chop it up but your posting style is very concentrated, did you go to the same forum-posting academy as drunkenmaster?

I shall try to mimic you for this response then, it's probably more readable. As I'm working for a quote of the entire post, assume any point I haven't answered is one I agree with

The P5E-VM was your first proper motherboard! . . . that means ums . . . oh my god your a nOOb! Hehe only joking, but you seem like you been in the PC hardware scene a lot longer? . . . I guess you are involved in some area of expertise that is a bit similar?

I knew very little about hardware a few years ago. I'd like to say I joined these forums for advice on what to buy, but in practice I did the research myself and joined for help troubleshooting a raid, then hung around for advice on how to overclock an e8400. I've learnt quite a lot about the sciences at uni, materials science is relevant to overclocking and fluid dynamics to watercooling, and read an awful lot of articles online. Also spent a while working as a laptop repair tech which taught me a fair bit which I wouldn't otherwise know. However the only processors I've spent time clocking are the e8400, q9550 and 920, my amd 7750 is sat in an ecs board which can't seem to manage a 200mhz overclock under water so I have little knowledge and some scepticism regarding amd.

Cool, I saw some (sketchup?) images you posted in Phenomics thread, impressive, dunno how hard that is too do but I can't do it so kudos lol!

I think I may well tapping-you-up in the distant future for some help with that stuff, I've always wanted to design some cases but never got past the MDF stages.

Solid edge mostly, to be honest the physical modelling part is trivial. I'm confident I could sit you in front of a copy of SE and within a couple of hours you'd be able to draw whatever you wished with it. Analysis of the model is a lot harder, I'm yet to get any useful results from this. It's just a quicker way of prototyping things from mdf really.

As for metalwork, I'm very poor at it though a reasonable carpenter. I'm expecting to write off a lot of aluminium plate during my first attempt at this. A lot of the motivation here is to learn to use the uni milling machines competently, rev 2 will feature sheet metalwork, by the end of which I should be a lot more use and will be pleased to help in any way I can.

I've learnt quite a bit about airflow vs thermal runaway over the years and in my mind it would be possible to design and build a uATX chassis that's cooled by a single fan

I'm pretty certain you're correct in this, air cooling can be done with great success if it's well thought through and the heatsinks are appropriate. I think it would be more difficult than using water though, possibly because I don't understand how to optimise/direct airflow whereas feeding tubing around is simple. As long as one or two low speed 92mm fans on a radiator can cope with a dual core anyway, which I'm pretty certain they will. There's also the potential to run the tubing a considerable distance to distant radiators.

Yeah I noticed that members of the fairer sex very do pick up on things like noise . . . so it's probably too easy a solution for you just to buy her a new net-top (atom) . . . but she likes to game though right? (sims 3)

Well, if I bought her an ion based nettop, she'd be just as happy but I'd be deprived of the justification for making things. Plus I've got an atom in a netbook, it's not so good. She plays even fewer games than me.

I did try to draw their attention to the power-draw but I didn't get a lot of love, the flames ranged from "Get Out You Hippy!" to "Don't Lecture Me!" etc etc . . . Of course that was a big lesson for me in how to express an opinion the right way!

I've seen similar opinions expressed when(ever) the odd person suggest overclocking to be a bad thing as it uses more electricity
I'm indifferent about electricity use in that I strongly suspect the electrical cost of making the low energy processors to eclipse their lifetime savings. However I'm fairly interested in electricity bills, which I'll have to pay next year but thankfully have included in rent this year (hence folding 24/7 ).

Yeah I agree the nVidia CUDA tech is quite interesting

That's about the only good non-folding use I know of at present. CPU's and GPUs are good at different types of workload, not many things lend themselves to parallel code. So it's a pretty poor argument for including a gpu, you and hotwired together have pretty much convinced me onboard is the way to go.

Are you saying that if you don't have a card to fit into the one single empty slot on the board you will be itchy?

Yes sadly, my atx board irritates me no end

 

[craptakular]

Nice one!

Any chance you could chuck us a screenie using the latest CPU-z build please! . . . when you have time of course, I'm also keen to know about the temps and what cooling you are using!

ok will do, I'm using a zalman 8000cnp cooler or summit, i'll dig out more info after the united game!

 

[Hotwired]

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

If you're still interested on this one I've just received the cpu (E8400 whoo) for my ITX (zotac 9300 based).

I want this build to be able to play older games on it occasionally, the GT220 I've put in gives it a reasonable 7000 3DMarks which is quite a way from the 2000 3DMarks of the onboard graphics - the difference between the first 3DMark test running at single figure fps and running 15-30fps.

Only real downside is that it has a fixed speed fan which must be whizzing at a fair few thousand rpm and is by a long way the loudest part. Since its heatsink is literally staring into the psu fan I think I'll see if it can run with the fan detached in almost-but-not-really passive cooling.

 

[craptakular]

Well my sempron 140 has a temp of 28C when watching a 1080p Blu-ray/HD-DVD, gpu temp on the 8200 is 53C while watching the movie.

Stutter free playback with 1.5GB RAM being used.

 

[PhoenixUK]

Well my sempron 140 has a temp of 28C when watching a 1080p Blu-ray/HD-DVD, gpu temp on the 8200 is 53C while watching the movie.

Stutter free playback with 1.5GB RAM being used.

What he said.
And that's 20-25% of the i3 price.

You've mentioned the sound codecs but then spending the cash saved on better sound card or set of speakers will beat the crap out of any integrated sound won't it ?

And the onboard GPUs on 785 boards are a lot better than the one integrated in i3 as well, just for the record.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You've mentioned the sound codecs but then spending the cash saved on better sound card or set of speakers will beat the crap out of any integrated sound won't it ?

The HD5670 handles Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio too. Hence the HD5450 will be able to do this:

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=112954

It will be interesting to see if the 890 series integrated graphics cards also support Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

 

[PhoenixUK]

The HD5670 handles Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio too. Hence the HD5450 will be able to do this:

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=112954

It will be interesting to see if the 890 series integrated graphics cards also support Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

I still think a 30quid xonar or soundblaster will do better job than any integrated mobo or gpu soundcards.... but then I don't know much about it so I might be mistaken and correct me if I'm wrong.