How much, roughly, to build a HTPC?

[Woden]

As title really? I'm ditching Virgin media, don't use the phone and all the channels we watch are on FAR satellite. So I'm going to choose a new ISP (Vodafone looks good at £28 for 76 down, 20 up).

I can plug the satellite cable direct into my tv and although ores not Freesat, it gets tons of channels and grabs a tv guide over wifi. But there's no PVR facilities.

So I'm thinking a small/silent HTPC to run as a PVR (right kodi add-ons can do this). Plex, and maybe Steam to stream from my main PC.

How much am I looking at here? Don't want to spend too much. Van always use the tv satellite tuner and streaming apps on the PS4.

 

[JasonM]

I'll try and help here. I run a HTPC in my front room, it's positioned at the base of my HiFi rack and most people just presume it's another HiFi unit.

To get cost down I recycled many components from other computers, this is what I have

1) Silverstone Grandia HTPC Case - All the Silverstone HTPC cases are good and fit in well with modern HiFi
2) I recycled an I5 750, Gigabyte 1156 board and some old 8GB of RAM.
3) I recycled also an old 96GB Kingston SSD
4) Using a Seasonic X PSU as it's dead silent
5) Have a Geforce GT 730 thats totally passive - it only uses 19w peak
6) Use a Intel CPU cooler, but with IC diamond paste, I have a speed profile setup to keep CPU fan noise down.

The above is all I have. For audio I take the spdiff from the Realtek onboard and feed directly into the DAC on my Pioneer amp. I only run 24bit 44.1kHz but I'm happy things sound great, Spotify premium for example only streams at this!

For TV I run a HDMI cable from the graphics card into a 1080p 50" TV. Things to note, if you want 4k then you need something faster then my i5 750. I would expect at least a second or 3rd generation i5 or above for smooth 4k viewing.

Yes I run Kodi and it's all totally fine on that system. You don't need a big HDD as your not really installing any apps. Again 8GB of memory is fine for this. You really don't need a powerful computer (unless your streaming 4k!), the main thing is low noise the above system is effectively silent, the only time I would hear it is if the CPU was working hard such as doing a virus scan, but most of the time CPU usage is under 20%.

Also, I have a mini Logitech wireless keyboard with built in mouse pad, this is really important also.

 

[Richeh]

If your going to stream from your main PC and not actually keep the files on the unit itself then why not just get an Android box and slap Kodi and Plex on it? If you did want local storage you could just plug in an external 4TB HDD. Probably a much cheaper option overall.

 

[Amp34]

Android box (fire TV is good) or a low power totally passive system.

Get an ITX board with HDMI out, a lowish power processor, small SSD drive and an external power brick, then stick it in a passive case like the Streacom FC8, or similar, depending on your design requirements.

That's basically my main PC at the moment, except I have 16GB of RAM in and a couple of SSDs as I do a lot of photo editing. Once you go completely silent, you don't go back...

 

[Woden]

If your going to stream from your main PC and not actually keep the files on the unit itself then why not just get an Android box and slap Kodi and Plex on it? If you did want local storage you could just plug in an external 4TB HDD. Probably a much cheaper option overall.

I'd only stream steam games.

Massive reason I'm not going for an android box is I will want a DVB-S tuner.