HTPC Spec

markwilliams82 · 22 Nov 2010 at 09:59

I'm going to be building a HTPC soon (budget £350-£400)

Can anyone give me some ideas on spec?

I need the following;

Mobo (would like to have HDMI output)
Memory
CPU
HDD (2 would be nice, 1 boot and a large drive for storage)
Optical drive (don't need Blu Ray as use PS3 for that Blu Ray playback
PSU
Media Case (capable of holding 2+ HDD's)

markwilliams82 · 24 Nov 2010 at 16:30

Ok so case wise, it cant be deep otherwise it wont fit in my tv cabinet.
I've come across the thermaltake SD100 which seems a good one or the Silverstone Grandia GD04B. Has anyone got any experience with this? I'm leaning to the Silverstone as it can take standard ATX PSU's and 2 HDDs

Based on this could anyone give me a spec for everything but the case with a budget of £250-300 (max)

Baboonanza · 24 Nov 2010 at 17:41

I have a Grandia 04 and I'm reasonably happy with it. My criteria was that it had to be under 18cm tall, take a 5.25" Blu-Ray drive and look nice. It certainly looks very nice, assuming your taste matches mine. I also like the fact that it comes with a blanking plate for the drive. Build quality is good.

I think it's a pretty well designed case, with one major downside: with a full sized optical drive you are very restricted in what CPU heatsink you can fit. You only get something like 80 mm of clearance. For this reason I would suggest that if you don't need blu-ray and want this case get a slimline DVD drive.

A quick suggested spec:
Athlon X2 250 - £42
OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 - £59
Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H AMD 880G - £65
Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - £75
Samsung SpinPoint M7 160GB (2.5") - £30
Slimline DVD - ~£25 (OCUK don't stock internal slimline drives)
300W - 400W PSU - £30 - £40 (OcUK are more geared to high W PSUs, I'd look somewhere else for this)

That should come to about £320 and is quite similar to my HTPC which runs Windows 7 with MediaPortal. If you want to run XBMC on Linux you'll want an Nvidia GPU for accelerated decoding.

markwilliams82 · 24 Nov 2010 at 17:59

That sounds a good spec, will the case accept a slimline dvd drive with no problems?

Will XBMC run on a windows PC without an nvidia gpu?

Baboonanza · 25 Nov 2010 at 09:57

Yes, yes. I'm not 100% on the slimline drive, but I don't see any reason at all why it shouldn't.

anything I don't mind · 25 Nov 2010 at 13:05

You need opengl capable graphics card for xbmc, i would buy an ati or nvidia card as a priority for htpc

Baboonanza · 25 Nov 2010 at 14:58

groen said:
You need opengl capable graphics card for xbmc, i would buy an ati or nvidia card as a priority for htpc

Incorrect. For XBMC on linux you need an Nvidia card. On Windows it supports DXVA (like everything else) so both will work. The GUI is written in OpenGL, but that's essentially irrelevant since everything will support that.

The mobo in the spec has a 880G chipset which includes something slightly better than an ATI HD4200 and I can certify myself that it's more than adequate.