I want a HTPC, but new to it, advice please?

Awesome, it's a lovely looking case, and cheap as well. Anything else worth considering? Not sure if it comes with fans though?
 
It doesn't come with any as standard, but can house up to 4x 80mm down the side.
You can pick up 80mm fans very cheap.
The zotac board only has 2 fan ports on the board and one of those is for the CPU fan.
So if you want for you will need a PWM 1-to-4 Splitter. (unless you want them running @ 100% all the time.

I like the look of almost all Silverstone HTPC chasis. just depends on what you can find for a good price. My favourite - and probably high up on the purchase list will be the succesor to the case you looked at: GD02MT
Just don't look at their price :eek:
 
I'm running an AMD Althlon64 3.0GHz x2, it's fairly low power, plenty powerful enough, and idles at 25c so fans are all on minimum making it near silent. With a HD 6450 it plays HD very nicely. You don't need a high spec PC for general HTPC use IMO.
 
Experience teaches me that whilst the vast majority of stuff plays nicely with hardware acceleration, don't buy low power hardware and expect it to be future proof or without the occasional issue, as it just won't cope if you decide to do something else, or if your video just doesn't work perfectly with hardware acceleration.

Depends on your priorities though, a low powered graphics card will play MOST stuff out there now fine, with a moderate CPU, but not everything :)

I'm using some Nexus Real Silent fans (set to about 9v/75% fan speed), Nexus PSU, passive GPU and an i3-2100 running under a Big Shuriken, again running about 50%. Damn near silent, the external hard drive probably makes more noise than the system itself.
 
Alexrose1uk said:
Experience teaches me that whilst the vast majority of stuff plays nicely with hardware acceleration, don't buy low power hardware and expect it to be future proof or without the occasional issue, as it just won't cope if you decide to do something else, or if your video just doesn't work perfectly with hardware acceleration.

Depends on your priorities though, a low powered graphics card will play MOST stuff out there now fine, with a moderate CPU, but not everything :)

I'm using some Nexus Real Silent fans (set to about 9v/75% fan speed), Nexus PSU, passive GPU and an i3-2100 running under a Big Shuriken, again running about 50%. Damn near silent, the external hard drive probably makes more noise than the system itself.
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What sort of stuff is it going to struggle with, I'm guessing anything 3d? Not sure if that post was directed at me in any way, but I've had zero issues with any kind of HD playback :)
 
I don't know what it will struggle with media wise because my 6450 plays 3D content brilliantly.
It has Blu-ray 3D decode acceleration built in, so using DXVA2 works fine. maybe it will struggle when UHD comes out. But we seem to be quite a way off that.


MilanoChris said:
Would it be noisy with all fans fitted and would I need it? Want it as silent as possible tbh.
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Thats what the PWM splitter is for, you can set the fan speed in the BIOS to run as quick or slow as you like depending on your temps.
 
R088ieS86 said:
I don't know what it will struggle with media wise because my 6450 plays 3D content brilliantly.
It has Blu-ray 3D decode acceleration built in, so using DXVA2 works fine. maybe it will struggle when UHD comes out. But we seem to be quite a way off that.




Thats what the PWM splitter is for, you can set the fan speed in the BIOS to run as quick or slow as you like depending on your temps.
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But UHD isn't planned to be available until at least 2016, I'm sure hardware will have moved on a long way by then!
 
andy_mk3 said:
What sort of stuff is it going to struggle with, I'm guessing anything 3d? Not sure if that post was directed at me in any way, but I've had zero issues with any kind of HD playback :)
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If he comes across a video which doesn't play nicely with the GPU accelleration, then thats the case right way. Regardless of the nature, unless needed for power/heat reasons, underpowered hardware is not a good idea.

H264 decoders are a lot more efficient than they used to be, but Hi10p as an example is already out there, which cannot be decoded by the GPU, not to mention H265 is due next year.

I guess part of it comes back to how long you want to keep a machine for, but I'd rather have a bit in reserve, than risk struggling.
 
Hi10p and H265/HEVC won't become a decent format until there is hardware to run it properly. Still a few years off IMO, by which point you can replace the £30/£40 GPU with a similar future product.
 
People already using Hi10p now, it probably won't take off, but the point still stands, new formats usually appear way before the hardware decoding. No point in being constrained by poor hardware when you don't need to be. Hell I came across H264 which didn't work 100% on various cards as well, Nvidia seeming to have mildly better compatibility. Again perhaps just drivers, whatever...BUT, it's ALWAYS good to have a fallback, in this case the CPU.

I say this out of simple raw experience. My HTPC's previous card was going to be a HD5450 until I came across some of the aforementioned H264 files for example, my mate still uses an old AMD64 for video decoding with a GPU for the decoding. It works well for most stuff, but ironically, he can't run his subtitles at desktop res because it consumes too much CPU to do so for some 1080p files. :) GPU decoding can work wonders, but it's a bad idea to 100% rely on it.
 
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