Smallest PC to run XBMC

Mark M

Mark M

Mark M

Soldato
Joined
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Location
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CAn someone recommend a system that is very small to sit in the tv unit and is ideally silent or at the very least no louder than a surround sound amp fan. Its to play some 1080p content but nothing higher than that.

Thanks.

Edit - looking at spending the least possible to meet the above requirements.
 
Simplest would probably be one of the bespoke boxes (Now TV, Amazon Fire TV etc that I believe will support XBMC) but personally I went for an Intel NUC with OpenElec and it works perfectly!

Not the cheapest option out there but definitely my choice!
 
 
This is what I purchased the other week I did have a spare ssd and 2tb hard drive so not included the price of storage.


AMD Athlon 5350 2.05GHz Quad Core Processor - Retail (Socket AM1) £43.99

Silverstone Strider SST-ST30SF SFX Series - 300 Watt Power Supply £41.99

Raijintek Metis - Black Mini ITX Case £35.99

Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 4GB (1x4GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 £31.99

Asus AM1I-A AMD AM1 (Socket FS1b) DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard £26.99

Sub Total : £150.79
Shipping : £8.00
VAT : £31.76
Total : £190.55

Minus shipping for me which took it down to £180.95
 
Jony27 said:
Thought about a Raspberry Pi?
Click to expand...

I was about to suggest this myself.

Raspberry Pi + XBMC (Or whatever it's called now)
Raspberry Pi + Plex
Raspberry Pi + XBMC + Plex Plugin

All are excellent options, and for roughly £35 for a Rasperry Pi Model B and max another £15 for accessories if you don't have an SD card and USB charger, you won't get much cheaper.
 
Solidrun, they make a unit called cubix.

Spec is far better than the pi and has a case and psu with it. Openelec 5 has full support for it.

I own a Pi and really want the Cubix. Better in every way.
 
Hard to complain about the Rpi with OpenElec, has run everything i've thrown at it, interface is responsive and gets frequent updates. Have it taped to the back of the tv! Recently got it running Hyperion, so basically has ambilight too!
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I was leaning more towards a PC based setup due to the fact I want to run some addons on it and thought that I would need to be a PC rather than a Pi or equivalent?
 
NUC + FLIRC + OpenElec + TVAddons wins. I've been doing this on an Acer Revo for years and now a NUC, it wipes the floor with my Pi set-up.
 
Avalon said:
NUC + FLIRC + OpenElec + TVAddons wins. I've been doing this on an Acer Revo for years and now a NUC, it wipes the floor with my Pi set-up.
Click to expand...

NUC is £300, Pi is £35.

I'm interested to know in what way it wipes the floor, as I'm looking for a similar spec myself.

Cheers
 
Unless you managed to find an insane deal, that £130 was barebones surely? So total cost of more like £230 by the time you've put an SSD and RAM in it, or £200 if you settle for a HDD instead of SSD

Don't get me wrong, they're nice bits of kit - but we're still comparing setups with a 7:1 price differential
 
Audigex said:
Unless you managed to find an insane deal, that £130 was barebones surely? So total cost of more like £230 by the time you've put an SSD and RAM in it, or £200 if you settle for a HDD instead of SSD

Don't get me wrong, they're nice bits of kit - but we're still comparing setups with a 7:1 price differential
Click to expand...

You can pick up the Celeron nuc for £120 and a 2gb stick of DDR3 SODIMM can be found for a fiver. You can run the OS From a USB Key.
 
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