Thinking of building an HTPC...

[GNEP]

Right then. I am thinking of putting together a PC that can sit by the telly at some point in the next few months. I know a few of you have done this sort of thing before, so I thought I'd ask a for a few pointers.

Basically, I have two guiding concepts: it has to be as quiet as possible and done as cheaply as possible.

In terms of use, I would like as basics:

• To have reasonable quality TV-out - at the moment using a v. old TV that doesn't have much in the way of sophisticated inputs
• To not necessarily need a computer monitor attached - only a TV
• To use it as a DVD player
• 5.1 sound output
• MP3 player
• Wireless keyboard & mouse, or a remote-control
• Decent CPU speed so it can double as another distributed computing box

And some features that would be nice-to-have:

• Recording of TV shows to the HDD
• Reception/decoding of freeview-type digital TV channels in the UK
• DVD burner (not really that necessary - most stuff can just sit on the hard disk(s) if I have enough space)
• Enough gaming performance to have it as a spare seat for LAN parties if really really needed... (would hook a monitor up for these times)

Anything I have forgotten there?

In terms of a case, I will either ghetto-hack one together myself from various old drive bays/cases/bits of wood, or re-use an ugly old case I have sitting around for starters. So no real worries there.

Processor: I was thinking of a Barton 2500+ Mobile which I could undervolt and (perhaps) underclock so that my zalman copper flower which is sitting doing nothing at the moment will be happy at low air flow.

Motherboard: one of the cheaper and smaller nForce2 ones would do.

Sound: I have a spare Audigy kicking around which would suffice as the soundcard.

Hard Disk(s): Will probably get a 120Gb SATA Samsung SP series as they are nice and quiet.

PSU: A quiet one. Nexus probably.

Video card/TV tuner:The tricksy part. I might be able to get my G450 back from my brother, which has no fan which is good, and the TV-out is good enough quality for my needs. And with enough tweaking I can set this up to run without a monitor, right?

Then I would need a TV tuner card as well - any suggestions? I know nothing at all about these things.

The alternative would be to get some variety of Radeon AIW - perhaps a passively cooled 9600 if I can find one - which would also give it enough gaming performance for the occasions when needed.

Or should I be looking at something else? Perhaps mobo with integrated graphics? I simply don't know enough to make an informed decision...

Many thanks in advance for your help...

George

[Evildead666]

you're gonna have a hells own job getting satellite TV onto the comp.
I looked into doing Sat TV reception a year or so ago, and the receivers are quite expensive, i could only find hauppage that would do it, and if you need a plug-in card for decoding (even for free channels you sometimes need a 'level-one' card), it added 80 quid to the price for the extra PCI card to read the Sat Card.

ATI all in wonder do have a breakout box with a lot of video in/out, but not sure whether sat reception is one of them. If the All in wonders ahve all the video in's and out's, then i'd go with that.

For the G400, a modification to the PIN's file is needed i think, to tell the card to boot to the 2nd Head (TV), and that should work. The method is on this site somewhere....

[GNEP]

Not satellite TV - digital terrestial TV through the normal aerial on top of the house - I am pretty sure I have seen PCI TV tuner cards that can take the place of a set-top box. This is a UK-specific request I guess...

[dZeus]

do you only want to record DVB-T stuff, or analogue broadcasts too?

as for tv-out: for best image quality get a G400 (g450 is rather useless for anything but video because of software scaling which eats cpu cycles for breakfast, making gaming or milkdrop and stuff on tv-out rather unenjoyable). However, the G400 is not really good for any modern games (though there are plenty of old games which run well on it, and are fun to play). From my experience the image quality difference between the G400 and for example a 9700 Pro is quite drastic, so I don't know if it's worth the trade. (plus the G400 is cheap too second hand).

You can get DOS TV-out on the G400 too (not on the G450 and up), by running the Matrox bios update utility which will prompt you for dos tv-out support.

[GNEP]

Thanks guys. Hmmm interesting re G450's limitations - might be better off getting something more modern rather than hunting down a G400...

dZeus - probably won't use it for recording much (to be quite honest, we don't watch a huge amount of TV) - so digital only recording would suffice I think.

And btw this:

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pages/products/data_nova-t-pci.html

seems to be the sort of TV-tuner that would work... what are Hauppage things like anyway?

[dZeus]

I think the Hauppauge DVB-T offering would do fine.

I'd still give the G400 a serious consideration though. It's both cheap and has great image quality.

[agallag]

If you go for Hauppauge, get one with hardware encoding. They're worth the premium.

If you only need software encoding, there are cheaper ones out there (like the Leadtek TV2000 XP Expert). Very cheap, and adequate performance.

[dZeus]

DVB already is MPEG2 for video, on need to transcode

[bsdgeek]

While I agree that the G400 has great TV-Out quality, it really wouldn't be suited for LAN Partying with many recent games anymore. I absolutely couldn't stand it when I briefly had to revert to my G400Max.

[xortam]

GNEP ... first of all you should get a digital display (i.e. fixed pixel). Buy a nice digital TV and start enjoying it with your normal broadcasts or rent digital TV equipment with your services. Buy as large a TV as your budget, space, and viewing distance will allow. Start planning on your HTPC as you recover the budget to build the PC ... then look at current technology and services and consider which approach to take.

How quiet do you want it ... 27 db? lower or how much louder is acceptable? Are you going to have other equipment in the HT that is already louder and is going to drown out the HTPC anyway at low listening levels?

[GNEP]

Cheers guys.

Sound: I am aiming to get as near to 20dB as possible (ie as near to not noticable with me reading a book in the room with no other sounds as possible...) The sound aspect however I am more confident with - having some (limited) experience there already.

With regards the TV - for the first year or so we will be using my housemate's TV which is v. old but a reasonable size - so I'm not willing to spend more money on that side until it dies (which could be less than 4 months given we are moving hopefully in July/August and that might kill it...)

Gaming side - not a killer really, but given how relatively cheap something like the 9600 is these days is there anything that should stop me? I would be willing to trade some of the TV-out quality of the G400 for the better gaming performance - if it means that 1 extra person can join in to the occasional game of UT2k4, all the better!

Any comments on the other components? Any opinions on the strength of Hauppage drivers and software?

dZeus - do I take this to mean that with a digital broadcast receiver PCI card with digital broadcasts, I won't need the CPU to do the encoding - it can take it straight to disk?

Thanks people! Great help.

[dZeus]

you most certainly can

that's what's so great about DVB stuff

there's nothing that should stop you from buying a ATI card, except the blurry-vision on the tv-out

[GNEP]

Hehe - with the current TV we are using I'm not sure we'd notice...

[Marshmallowman]

strangely enough if you want to go dvb-s etc linux is quite good...but crap for normal terrestial TV.

I think its all becasue there has been a lot developemnt making dreamboxes...
But I htink it have to be a dedicated machine.

[leech]

I'm planning eventually to do the same thing (made a thread on here) though without the LAN thing, mostly my HTPC will be for viewing DVD's and playing MAME games. I'm planning on using linux at the core.

I have a WinTV-FM card from Hauppauge and quite frankly, it works better in linux than in windows...

I'm going to use the Marvel G400 for my setup, maybe you could find one of those on eBay for a decent price. Anyone else have thoughts on if this would be good for it? (I wouldn't try to guess how UT2k4 would run on it though....)

Leech