spec me a small form HD HTPC

More than happy speccing you later, but I think for a HD and Blu-ray drive/drives youre gonna struggle coming in on budget
 
if you cut the blu-ray part for now (as their about £400 on their own on OcUK at least) i reckon you could just about get a system includin a 360 hd-dvd drive. but its def gonna be tight and probably just over £600
 
oops sorry i meant to say that i want a system that is capable of playing blue ray and hd-dvd not actually have the drives.

So can i get a system powerful enough to play those above formats under £600 but without the actual drives?
 
forgot something, what about 4 USB2.0, firewire, sd card slot, wifi 802.11/g/b/n

ethernet t10/100/1000

dvi/vga or even hdmi

can i still stay under £600
 
Actually, you can do this in stead, forgot the Mobo has 1080p and HDMI support :p The mobo has the firewire, USB, and ethernet bells n whistles
Code: 
- LGA 775 
- ATI® RX1250 
- ATI® RX700
- FSB1066 
- HDMI™ 1080P 
- PCI-E X16 
- Dual DDR2-800 
- Gigabit Ethernet 
- 7.1 CH HD Audio 
- SATA 3G RAID 
- RoHS Compliancy


Righteeeooo.
Here is a revised spec, with reasons to follow



As said before, no need for the GFX card, that motherboard will do just fine with your visual needs.
I went with the Hauppage 1300 in stead, as it is the Media centre edition, get the remote with, and I have been using it now for a long time and it's a great tuner card, my freeview reception is impecable.
I specced a USB card reader, because you cannot fit an internal one into that case. Yes the case is a tad more expensive than it's cheaper older brother (in which an internal card reader wil fit), but it really oozes quality and is super silent + a cool programmable VFD.
If you want the case to be even more silent, get a 3rd party cooler for your CPU, something like an arctic freezer of summit, tis what I have in mine.

For an HTPC, this spec is quite a mean machine, some might say it's overkill, BUT if you will be doing recording, channel hopping...decoding etc, this baby will breeze through it.

I didn't include an OS, as you have not mentioned it.
Personally, i would just use XP pro if you have it already, and stick on a open source front end for your HTPC needs. I'm quite an avid fan of Media-Portal, which can be downloaded at www.team-mediaportal.com. It is a tad more fiddly to set up according to people who prefer MCE over it, but it feels much more natural to me, much easier to set-up with loads of user-requested functionality.
 
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wow, thanks for the great reply and help

One other thing i forgot to mention is, is the case bigger enough to have a dvd dual layer writer?

I won't need the TV card, as i am not looking for watching any kind of TV, recording or anything like that.

What would be nice to know is, can these components be interchangeable, let's say i want to build a wicked PC for gaming can i take these parts out and add them to another PC easily?

Also is there room in the case to put a good graphics card for playing the latest games, i am only looking to play media and games at 1280x720p as that is the native resolution of my cinema projector?

TIA

Edit: Is it possible with this current case to have the SD card slot built inside the case?

Also is it possible to get a wifi card without an antenna? A bit like the Nintendo Wii, you know that has 802.11g built inside but the Wii does not have any antenna at the back
 
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dvdbunny said:
One other thing i forgot to mention is, is the case bigger enough to have a dvd dual layer writer?
Click to expand...

dual layer dvd-rw's are the same size as normal drives so thats a yes :)

dvdbunny said:
can these components be interchangeable, let's say i want to build a wicked PC for gaming can i take these parts out and add them to another PC easily?
Click to expand...

Yes, you should be able to swap literally every bit of the PC. want a better g-card? buy one and plug it into the mobo. new cpu? (socket dependant that is) buy one, swap with the old one :). even if you wanted to swap from Intel to AMD, all you'd need is a new mobo and cpu

dvdbunny said:
Also is there room in the case to put a good graphics card for playing the latest games, i am only looking to play media and games at 1280x720p as that is the native resolution of my cinema projector?
Click to expand...

I think there should be enough room for dual slot cards etc, only thing you may want to watch out for is the length of the card. though someone that actualyl has one of these cases will be able to answer this better

dvdbunny said:
Is it possible with this current case to have the SD card slot built inside the case?
Click to expand...

again not too sure on this one. if it has a spare drive bay then i guess so. if not then maybe some modding would be required :)

dvdbunny said:
Also is it possible to get a wifi card without an antenna? A bit like the Nintendo Wii, you know that has 802.11g built inside but the Wii does not have any antenna at the back
Click to expand...

pass lol not very clued up on wifi
 
I dont think the chipset on the abit motherboard is capable of demanding 1080p with the current drivers.

Also the nVidia 8500 and 8600 seem particularly useful at h.264 HD, but thats going to add cost
 
Gah - Imageshack took that pic down :(
Will do the same spec again for you :)

I wouldnt put a decent GFX card in there, since it's supposed to be a HTPC case, I'm sure you will at some point run into trouble.
 
hey guys, thanks for the replies

I would like to put a top end graphics card in there, as at some point i would like to then take it out and put it into a proper desktop gaming PC. I thought if i could have the best of both worlds gaming and media while having a PC look like an HTPC then that would be awesome if possible.
 
guys i was in PC world, and i saw this ultra small PC which reminded me of the nintendo wii, it's dimensions looked the same it had a slot loading disc drive and it was core 2 duo, i just forgotten the name, do you know anything about it?

I was thinking of making a htpc that size, which is at a fraction the size of the antec case.

Why is it so hard to make a htpc that is as small as the mac mini? It should not be hard to do, the features in the mac mini are very similar to a PC it just has a different operating system.

Can i ask, if i had a power mac with windows XP installed would i be able to play all the latest PC games?

I had this idea to make a HTPC the same size or a little bigger what ever size is possible to look like a mac mini, but i want it PC based. Then i thought i would make it power full enough to be able to play the latest games in 1280x720p using the new asus external graphics card when that comes out, i should be able to make it small enough as i won't be needing to put inside a big graphics card as i only want to do HD 1080p movie playback. The mac mini is already super small and plays back 1080p media perfectly, so i should be able to do it. You got any thoughts on the best hardware and case to make this happen?

TIA
 
all of these small pcs (and edit out the competitor) use laptop components and iirc the one you are refering to uses gma integrated junk (same as mac mini and fine for wp etc) . So you will not be able to play any modern game at decent frame rates.
 
so there good for media playback, but surely there processors are fast enough for gaming, look at the mac mini it uses intel 1.86gz core duo processor, if i had one of those or even the core 2 duo in that PC world combined with the asus graphics card then wouldn't it be super fast for gaming, let's say asus created a 800GTX model as an external graphics card?
 
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