Low power/noise HTPC upgrade

Spider · 12 Nov 2008 at 19:21

After I come home today to find my P4 3Ghz MCE2005 box dead, its finally time for an upgrade. I can reuse the DVD drive (as long as its concealed within the case, as the current drive is white!), NovaT500 DVB-T freeview card, the 500GB hard drive, but want to upgrade the following:

New slimline HTPC case (no bigger than 15x45x45 cm HxWxD) and PSU
New dual core CPU (any point going quad for a HTPC?)
Ram – 4GB
Gfx Card

I don’t really want to go much more than £500-£600 but my main requirements are that when Windows7 is released, this will upgrade without hitch (will persevere with XP MCE 2005 for the time being), and has the lowest viable power consumption and noise. The machine won't be used for gaming or anything like that, just as a living room HTPC

Any suggestions on specification is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

jak731 · 13 Nov 2008 at 00:04

Your basket
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Asus P5QL-CM Intel G43 Micro-ATX (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £59.99
(£70.49) £59.99
(£70.49)
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 "LGA775 Core 2" 2.50GHz (800FSB) - Retail £56.99
(£66.96) £56.99
(£66.96)
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2 (OCZ2G8004GK) £34.99
(£41.11) £69.98
(£82.22)
Sub Total : £186.96
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City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £8.25
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £34.16
Total : £229.37

add case and PSU,

Spider · 13 Nov 2008 at 09:37

Thanks for that. Would an Intel Dual core be a better HTPC rig than an AMD/780G route then? Undecided which platform to build from...

I've pretty much always stuck with Intel, but remember a big deal being made from a HTPC perspective of the 780 when released

jak731 · 14 Nov 2008 at 01:06

G43/g45 does decode HD onboard like 780i, so depending on your main rigs cpu, i would base the htpc on that. ie if your main rig is AMD, go amd with the htpc, if your main rig is intel, go intel with the htpc, that way the htpc can also act as a spare parts box for your main pc