I continue to recommend a 2.5" HDD for the boot drive, because
they’re so incredibly quiet and they sip power
Have you considered one of those CF card/IDE adapter cards? It’d be cheaper, quieter and probably less power consuming.
I’ve been looking into building my own HTPC for quite a while, and I love reading these articles- they help me know what to look for. I am thinking of running MythTV instead of XP or Vista- ever have any experience with that?
I’ve put together a list of what plan on using on NewEgg. I am looking at using the Antec Veris Fusion case with stock power supply, any recommendations? Otherwise, my parts match up pretty close to yours.
I always thought that Intel speedstep technology to be superior. Cool’n’Quiet is far too troublesome to activate (bios setup, driver download/install) that I never really used it. On the other hand I never had problems with speedstep to reduce the clock on my laptop.
Maybe cool’n’quiet is better now, my old desktop PC is an AMD Athlon 64 bits socket 939 and I found out that activating cool’n’quiet was more trouble than it was worth.
Where does the video come in? Where is the cablecard slot?
No component video is sure to be a miss in that mobo. My home theater PC is that athlon (2ghz) with a DFI lan party SLI-D (great onboard sound) and a GeForce 6600 GT. Pre-historic, bought that 2 years ago, but in my country that is still quite a computer. My tv is not even high definition or widescreen, I have to use 480i (component out at least…) and my 5.1 sound is quite bad. That 250U$ computer would cost something like 700U$ here in Brazil and 700U$ is a lot more money here than it is in the US.
@IAN
I recently moved my desktop pc had built to the living since I wasn’t using it much. My wife was against it at first, but now that it is there, she uses it more than I do. She loves it. We have Netflix, and now we can watch a lot of movies and TV shows online.
@Jeff
This is the first time I have posted but I wanted to tell you I truly enjoy your blog, and find it illuminating and am looking forward to using you new site also.
I do have a question about your HTPC though. I was wondering what are you using for your remote for the PC. I am currently using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and while that works, I would rather use a remote.
Jeff,
I created Free.TV over eight years ago, trying to build a Media Center PC. I created my own software as well run Media Center and Vista Ultimate. Tivo is by far the easier software. Media Center are more powerful, but there lies in the problem - they are designed to behave like PCs, not appliances.
Where does the video come in? Where is the cablecard slot?
See article: “Hauppauge PVR-150 dual analog PCI tuner card”. Cablecard is still immature on PC right now for various reasons.
Cool’n’Quiet is far too troublesome to activate (bios setup, driver download/install) that I never really used it.
Er… no configuration or drivers are required for Cool n’ Quiet. It “just works”. I suppose you can turn it off in the BIOS if you don’t want it, but it is on by default at least for this BIOS.
what are you using for your remote for the PC
I used the default media center IR remote for a long time, then I switched to one of the Harmony IR remotes:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000148.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000193.html
Oh yes you do need, in windows XP that is.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/128
“To use this feature [cool’n’quiet] you will need an Athlon 64 processor, a motherboard with this feature enable at its setup, to install the Athlon 64 CPU driver and Cool’n’Quiet software. To accomplish this, go to http://www.amd.com, Support Downloads, Utilities, Drivers Updates, AMD Athlon 64 Utilities, Drivers Updates and download and install the CPU driver and the Cool’n’Quiet software accordingly to your operational system.”
The driver comes built-in in Windows Vista. Windows Update in Windows XP also download that driver if you run it.
I hate small fans, anything less than 80mm in an htpc is outragously loud.
120mm fan are much much quieter… and a href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=articleitem=509num=1"the enermax enlobal fans/a have no comparison… I can’t even tell that my computer is on, and its 3 feet next to my ears… and I’ve got it overclocked from 2.4 up to 3.2 stable.
granted, the case is a little larger, but considering the number of things it replaces… and the extra height allows for more harddrives.
Jef:
Stock cooler two 60mm case fans?
That is not a setup most of us would usually think of as quiet. Do you run the fans at very low rpm?
Stock cooler
I was skeptical, too, but the AMD temperature controlled cooler is amazingly quiet. Part of it is the CPU never gets very hot, even under dual prime95 load.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article807-page4.html
The fan connected to the CPU_FAN header on the other hand had an almost linear relation to the Core temperature, following it very closely, increasing gradually in a nice, steady, gentle curve. We found its behavior to be pleasant — there were no sudden, jarring ramp ups in speed.
That is not a setup most of us would usually think of as quiet. Do you run the fans at very low rpm?
yes-- that’s why the black zalman speed reducer and splitter are there!
Hi Jeff,
I bought the same motherboard about a month ago to build a media center and have had some “issues” with it. When using the HDMI output the sound has a tendancy to switch off when bring the pc out of sleep mode, requiring you to reboot the PC to get the sound back!
When using the DVI output the screen won’t always wake up after coming out of sleep (it’s about 50/50). The workround I came up with was to tell the BIOS you’re using DVI but plug a HDMI cable in! This now works reliably.
Also, I’ve noticed that Vista Media Center has a habit of coming out of sleep mode when you don’t expect it to and then not going back to sleep. For the last 2 days it’s been waking up about 6:30am and not going back to sleep. I suspect this is down to a scheduled task starting the box up (the MS “customer improvement program” task!). The annoying thing is that the event viewer logs the fact that the pc came out of sleep mode but says it was awoken by “unknown source”.
I’ve also found AMD’s Cool 'n Quite technology to be a bit of a mixed bag. When unpausing a program it sometime takes a few seconds to throttle back up the CPU causing jumpy video playback whilst the sound is ok!!!
Sean
@steve and Kindler
With my cheap digital tv tuner usb stick from pinnacle, I can either connect the antenna for over-the-air or connect my coax for cable.
Hey Jeff, how much power does it draw under load?
I have better numbers with an off the rack $399 Acer desktop:
This is hardly the point of my post-- it’s about power per watt. But I agree there’s something weird going on with the primary HDD numbers. I suspect it’s because the primary HDD (2.5" model) is the only device still connected via old-school IDE. I ordered a SATA laptop hard drive to replace that.
As much as I enjoy the system, it is a P.I.T.A. to set up; definately not ready for the masses IMO.
Personally I feel that there should be a dedicated PC in the living room anyway, where your cable hookup already is. It feels weird to me to have a desktop PC in your office doing cable TV recording tasks and on 24/7.
how much power does it draw under load?
Watching a video, around 70 - 80 watts depending on the format. I haven’t measured prime95 or full gaming 3D loads, because I doubt this machine will ever be under that kind of load. In fact it is idle 99% of the time; even doing torrents and other background stuff it’s maybe 50 watts, tops.
One other quirk you should know about – the “Power Options, Edit Plan Settings, Change Advanced Power Settings, Processor power management, Minimum processor state” kept getting reset to 100%, which means the CPU would never throttle down (!).
I searched a few forums and found the ATI drivers (I’m using 8.4) are responsible for this. I disabled the one ATI service in the service manager (I think it’s called something like “external notification service”) and now the minimum processor state stays at 5%, which is the default for the out of box balanced power plan.
Nice I run something similar but fitted it all into a shuttle case which makes it pretty damn small considering everything apart from a 5.1 amp is in it including dual digital tuner for freeview (uk free digital tv).
Have you considered attaching a really big heatsink and getting rid of the cpu fan I have done this before with a Scythe ninja heatsink on an intel board. The only thing is I can’t see how much height space you have in the case to fit something like that.
Have to checked into remote control options? Maybe some kind of USB IR receiver so you can take advantage of a Harmony remote?
Steve Kindler – thank you.