HTPC for... this side of £350?

Stains

Stains

Stains

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30 Aug 2011
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Southampton
I have been wanting to build one for a little while now and getting increasingly keen on the idea. But can only really top about £350 at the moment. Would it be possible to put together a system that can handle Blu-Ray & 1080p content running through XBMC, SSD drive for operating system and all Artwork etc, and maybe a couple of Samsung F3's or something similar to give me a few TB's of storage?

Any help would be muchly appreciated. I showed Miss Stains a few YouTube vids of XBMC to show her the sort of thing i'm looking at and she likes, so think now might be a good time to go for it. ;)

Stains
 
From what I have seen bluray can be a bit annoying to do through XBMC so I have personally decided to go for a cheap player instead for that. I have just picked up my external player for £40. If you do go the route I have then I recommend the following.

Zotac ZD22 - £190
4gb ddr3 sodimm - £20
2tb external drive - £60

Then just get an ssd of your choice with the money left. I guess with the player on it too it will go slightly over the £350 budget, but it will have more power than the atom systems to keep the menu etc running all smoothly.
 
Stains said:
I have been wanting to build one for a little while now and getting increasingly keen on the idea. But can only really top about £350 at the moment. Would it be possible to put together a system that can handle Blu-Ray & 1080p content running through XBMC, SSD drive for operating system and all Artwork etc, and maybe a couple of Samsung F3's or something similar to give me a few TB's of storage?

Any help would be muchly appreciated. I showed Miss Stains a few YouTube vids of XBMC to show her the sort of thing i'm looking at and she likes, so think now might be a good time to go for it. ;)

Stains
Click to expand...
Out of curiosity, is there a reason you want an ssd on your htpc? Is it going to be a multi purpose pc or just used for xbmc?
 
It will mainly be used for xbmc, with a bit of surfing every now and again. Just want it to run perfectly smooth.
 
In all honesty, I would say an ssd would be an expensive overkill. I have sammy spinpoint F4s in a shuttle htpc and it runs xbmc fine.

I guess the best way would be to try it without an ssd first and if you're not happy you can always buy the ssd later. I can't imagine you would have any issues without an ssd, though.
 
No idea, to be honest, as I invariably just switch it on when I know I am going to watch it later, so it's not really an issue for me.

I shall go downstairs and time it for you lol
 
It takes 1m 20s from pressing the on switch to being loaded into xbmc.

Xbmc is in the startup folder with a 30s delay just to make sure everything is all sorted before it starts to load. There was a reason I set the delay, but I can't really remember why now lol
 
Ok, thanks for that. Part of the reason why i'm leaning towards SSD as i am hearing of 15 second boot times and such. I have allowed for it in my budget so think I might just go for it.
 
Fair enough.

As I say, boot times don't bother me, especially not with my media pc. It was actually a lot quicker than I thought it was going to be when I timed it lol
 
any in particular you would suggest? Am i right in thinking I need to have all the artwork on the SSD too or had that sit on the HDD with the rest of my media?
 
In my HTPC (still to be built) I will use the SSD for artwork and anything related to XBMC so everything will load super fast...

Regarding 64GB SSD I recommend this one. It is reliable and very good!
 
I just built a HTPC. I went down the custom PC route as the Atom/Celeron/E-350 pre-built ones are just way too slow and annoying!

XBMC is also too annoying to actually use if you download a lot of stuff regular. Sure it looks nice, but it's pretty pointless and can be really frustrating when it pulls the wrong info and having to make sure everything is named correctly etc. I just use organised folders, ie Movies, TV, etc, and browse manually, keep it nice and simple!

Don't really need an SSD, I leave mine in sleep so it takes seconds to "boot" but even from off it takes less than a minute before it's fully usable.

Total cost for mine was about £300 but I already had the HDD which helped but if you get an A6 and cheaper motherboard and case you could save a fair bit. Do that and add a Blu-ray drive and it would still be near to your £350 budget.

AMD "Llano" A8-3850 Fusion APU with Radeon HD 6550D Graphics @ 2.9GHz
Asus F1A75-M PRO MicroATX Motherboard
Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory
Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB HDD
Antec Minuet 350 Slimline Case with 80PLUS 350w PSU
Xebec iTouchpad Diamond Wireless Keyboard with Built In TouchPad

Here are a few pics. Found a spare SATA DVDRW drive and put that in but couldn't be bothered to take any more pics, you get the idea though. I use my PS3 for Blu-ray's.

 
dbmzk1,

I suggest you learn how to use xbmc properly with the software to compliment it before saying its useless. If you use xbmc with a combo of sabnzbd, sickbeard and couchpotato you would find you wouldn't ever have another problem with naming, plus get other bonuses. The system I suggested is an su2300 based system which is a lot better than the atom but doesn't use much extra power, for example it idles at 23w for the whole nd22 system.

If you want fast booting then look on YouTube for openelec boot time with ssd. Though I suggest keeping with nvidia gpu's with Linux based OS's.
 
saitrix said:
dbmzk1,

I suggest you learn how to use xbmc properly with the software to compliment it before saying its useless. If you use xbmc with a combo of sabnzbd, sickbeard and couchpotato you would find you wouldn't ever have another problem with naming, plus get other bonuses. The system I suggested is an su2300 based system which is a lot better than the atom but doesn't use much extra power, for example it idles at 23w for the whole nd22 system.

If you want fast booting then look on YouTube for openelec boot time with ssd. Though I suggest keeping with nvidia gpu's with Linux based OS's.
Click to expand...

Any chance you could expand a little on your spec? It will be running off of Win 7 64-bit as i would rather stick with what I know (Not including Win 7 in budget btw).
 
My htpc spec is nothing special but it works ok, though I am looking at upgrading in the next month or so, I am eyeing up the ND22 which I would keep on 24/7 so it also acts as a nas/downloader box too. If you get the list I suggested on my earlier post you will have similar power usage, plus it comes with a vesa mount, so you can mount it on the back of your tv out of view.

The only thing I missed off before was a remote. I personally like using a remote for my htpc use, as I have xbmc auto loading with it. I just stick my current htpc into sleep (done within xbmc) and then I have the power button on the remote setup to recover it from sleep. If I need to do anything more indepth on the htpc then I use remote desktop (Logmein) to control it, so I have no need for a keyboard or mouse connected to my htpc. If you want a remote you want to go for an MCE compliant remote, the below link will help you with that, I currently use the cheap (~£7) 'Unbranded MCE remote' on that page.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Remote_Control_Reviews

If you are going to use Win7 100% then either AMD or Nvidia gpu's are fine. Are you after a smaller discrete htpc that you keep on 24/7 or are you after more like dbmzk1's build?
 
Smaller the better mate. I am not to up on all this so excuse if it's a dumb question but when you refer to "nas/downloader box" what you mean by that?
 
NAS - network attached storage. So I make the stuff on the hard drive available to all the pc's on my network, so thats one of the reasons for keeping the htpc on all the time, so then all your media is available on all your devices. I do all my downloads on that pc so it goes straight to the correct place, so you aren't using a full sized pc to just download some stuff. Do some reading up on sabnzbd, sickbeard and couchpotato and it will become clear.

It will take an evening to set this all up, but once setup you can't beat it. I have just converted a friend of mine, he now swears down by his little htpc and xbmc.

Well with the setup I said all you will see is an external harddrive and your remote control receiver. Oh here is a nice review for the ND22.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1069-page1.html
 
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