American Jeff’s comment on the cost of Vista is a good one. You really should include all the costs in your list at the top of the article, not just your upgrade cost (ignoring the costs of parts you have sitting around the house). So, if you add in the following:
Case: $50 (I could only find it on ebay)
Tuner Card: $159.99
2 (or 3?) Hard Drives: $200 ($300?)
Vista: $109.99 (Home Premium x64 OEM)
PowerStrip: $29.95
That adds at least $549.93 to your original $303 for a total of (at least) $853. If you really have 3 hard drives instead of 2 and are using Vista Ultimate, then your total cost is actually around $1,000.
Thanks for adding in all you other costs. My $1,000 number was (obviously) way off. For what I designed, myself, that was over 6 months ago and the prices have dropped a lot since then. Also, I had chosen much more expensive items. I like your numbers much better than mine.
Regarding the TiVo costs, at the time, I could have bought the TiVo HD and transferred my lifetime subscription for something like $399 + $199 =~ $600. Right now, it looks like the Series3 is going for about $600 and a 3-year subscription for about $300. So, call it $900 until the upgrade urge hits again. At the time, it was much easier and cheaper to stay with TiVo. Today, it’s iffy. If the CableCard issue would go away, I’d be leaning back to the HTPC side.
I just went with the same 780g motherboard and recommend it.
for the person who recommended the asus off the shelf I have a few questions; will the asus hardware accelerate vc1? how quiet is it? can it do bitperfect audio? can it drive a separate touchscreen? how much power does it consume?
I currently have an htpc and I use it as a digital media hub.
I rip all the dvds I own, borrow or rent to it. I also store all my music on it. currently I have 1.5 tb of data and rapidly growing.
all this music and video can be watched anywhere on the network and also synced to my ipod.
as far as wifeproofing, there really Is no need once you’ve locked down your htpc.
that is chosen reasonable goals and put the tools in place to implement them.
my htpc has a core set of apps that I use and nothing else:
vista mce sp1
dvd decrypter.
mymovies 2.3 (the newer version is bloatware)
daemon tools.
itunes with auto update disabled.
cdex
filezilla ftp server for remote file management.
ffdshow (i literally don’t install any other codecs)
dvd decrypter rips movies to a watched location.
cdex rips to a watched location.
right now my htpc only does sd because HD on htpc is still a minefield of crappy and expensive hardware and software.
so my htpc is just as reliable as any tivo and since my software never changes I have ghost backup that will put me right back up to speed in the case of something going wrong.
where cases are concerned antecs htpc case is almost impossible to beat; build in ir receiver, vfd, hidden drive bay, silent fans, and good looks. all around amazing piece of work.
I’m also glad to have the opportunity to support AMD because I’m desperately afraid of a world where Intel is the only CPU vendor. And you should be too.
While looking at parts I saw something interesting. Gigabyte is shipping motherboards with what it calls Dynamic Energy Saver. The wild marketing claims sound interesting but I am still looking for a solid unbiased review.
You really should include all the costs in your list at the top of the article, not just your upgrade cost (ignoring the costs of parts you have sitting around the house).
Why exactly? This post is clearly about a upgrade to an existing vista setup not a new build.
[Please excuse this comment appearing in more than one place. I intended it to be here, in your latest blog entry at the time of the comment, and also in a somewhat related one, i.e. involving system building - but landed on the wrong blog entry when posting initially I guess.]
Jeff–
I know this blog entry has you up to your knees or above in comments.
I’m hoping though that a link to my recent comment / request for your advice or thoughts, on your now nine day old blog entry re: upgrading your 18 month old main home power PC, will get you to notice it, and hoepfully want to respond!
Your PC building and overclocking posts both on Scott Hanselman’s system and your upgrade have I think nudged me over the edge towards rolling my own once again, though I haven’t done that for a decade now (and am using a laptop as my main home system at the moment.) Time for a Vista 64 / 8gb ram / foray I think. But I need your mobo and other advice. Hence the link!
I just finished building my own HTPC. I want to share a pain point I had with playing Netflix Watch it now.
My video card had a S-video out and my TV accepted s-video. Netflix watch it now worked fine when I had a TV AND a monitor attached. But when I removed the Monitor, Netflix kept giving me a DRM error message.
I called Netflix support. The deal is: If you want to play netflix on a tv you also need a monitor plugged in. Microsoft DRM required this. No exceptions.
Having a separate monitor in my den wouldn’t do. To get around this, I got a AVermedia Key Micro TV Scan Converter. It makes windows think my TV is a monitor and it will plan Netflix on the TV with out a separate monitor. Not just that, but it also got rid of some flickering and the image in general looks much better.
I’m desperately afraid of a world where Intel is the only CPU vendor
There is a very real chance AMD could go out of business, particularly since Intel is almost always the better CPU choice these days. Dual-core ultra-low idle power (while still being powerful enough to easily handle hi-def) is of the very few areas where AMD is still winning.
On an unrelated note, I finally figured out how to get AC3/DTS audio passthrough in ffdshow!
check “Maximize SPDIF compatibility” at the bottom for each (the - latest FFDShow doesn’t seem to have this setting, however)
Now I can play back videos with embedded AC3/DTS audio in their full glory in Windows Media Center. Prior to this, I was stuck with generic stereo output on my receiver.
Hi - i bought the ASUS barebone P2-M2A690G that comes with a very similiar AMD based mobo with ATI. Running Vista MCE.
I use the Hauppauge HVR1300, just fits the box with a little twisting (of the box, not the board).
My real question: “Has anyone gotten MCE hacked to support 2 types of tuners (i.e. an analogue cable tuner and a DVB-T tuner)”? It’s a stupid limitation of MCE only to support one type of tuners at a time. MCE recognizes both tuners, but to get all the channels and EPG to work on both is not possible (I haven’t yet found a hack to do so).
And a few comments:
Cool n’ Quiet - works out of the box.
QFan also but lowest fan speed is too high - i now use SpeedFan instead, only annoying thing is the high speed while booting before speedfan takes over (you have to disable the QFan control in the bios). http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php
I also have the problems with the box starting up in the middle of the night - it’s the RTC but haven’t been able to track the app down yet - powercfg (that’s part of Vista is a great tool to check your sleep settings and you can see the cause of the last wake up event). To check your sleep’ability a great tool is Sleeper. http://www.passmark.com/products/sleeper.htm
So if anyone has some good tips here please let me know.
Sometimes the system does not wake up correctly, and I have to restart - i still think that this is the BIOS - latest BIOS update fixed a lot of issues - but not all, and ASUS support is poor, very poor.
Jeff - Thanks for the tip on the ATI drivers resetting to 100% - have seen this error as well - does it on reboot.
For most people there isn’t really a difference in processors. Most people have their processor idle most of the time. The thing really comes down to marketing. Even here in Brazil I see intel ads in TV. Also Core 2 Duo have a more appealing name than Turion and such. Remember the Pentium 4 era? 3ghz processor with absurd power usage and still, quite a sucess.
And who says that AMD can’t come up with a better chip like they did with the 939 socket?
You discuss playback performance, but how does that setup cope for recording 2x hi-def digital broadcasts at the same time? That seems to be a real litmus test for HTPC’s.
What about sound card and speakers. U’ve forgotten those!
Those onboard sound solutions SUCK! Need an x-fi from creative or auzentech or ASUS Xonar with good DACs and/or digital out and processing. Logitech z-5500 for a 5.1 solution or AudioEngine A5 as a 2 channel setup.
The reason I suggest including all costs of building an HTPC in the article is because:
the article is entitled: “Building Your Own Home Theater PC”
the second sentence of the article is: “It’s shocking how cheap and easy it is to build a home theater PC these days.”
and, the last sentence of the article is: “If you haven’t considered building your own home theater PC – why not?”
It’s not the end of the world if Jeff doesn’t include all the costs. It’s just that it would be more complete and provide better service if the article gave some idea of the true costs of building an HTPC.
The reason I mention this is because after the Fall 2007 TiVo software update, I was seriously considering throwing in the towel on TiVo and building my own HTPC. I kept seeing references to how cheap it was to do this. So, I went and priced it out. Surprise! It is NOT cheap. Even throwing in a lifetime TiVo subscription or figuring a 3 year useful life, it’s still cheaper and easier to have the TiVo.
The price issue can unfold in a couple of different ways, too. Once I figured out that an HTPC would cost over $1,000 to build, I thought I’d make it MORE than just an HTPC. But, to do that, I wanted (needed?) to upgrade the motherboard, CPU, video card, and cooling (and how about a sound card, keyboard, and mouse (or [drooling] speakers and a receiver?). Even more expensive. So, what about re-using old components I have here in the house (like Jeff)? Well, all my old stuff is OLD. P4-level stuff with horrible power consumption (and, therefore, noisy). As Jeff mentioned in another post, “When Hardware is Free, Power is Expensive:”
Does anyone have any good resources on setting up an xbox 360 as a media center extender? I have looked around on thegreenbutton.com and googled a bit and I can’t find any good, well written guides.
how does that setup cope for recording 2x hi-def digital broadcasts at the same time?
Generally recording is hardware assisted, so the only thing the PC has to do is write the stream to disk. This is all I/O to disk. Since the high-definition stream is already compressed video at that point, it’s not a particularly great I/O load. But I suppose it could be; at that point you’d want a separate fast 3.5" disk for your recording and a nice quiet 2.5" disk operating system, and you should be fine.
What about sound card and speakers. U’ve forgotten those!
The receiver is doing all the decoding of the digital audio data… you could certainly use the Logitech Z-5500 series, just plug the optical out from the mobo into the optical in of the Z-5500.
So this is just Analog in from the cable out to an EDTV?
Yep, all recordings created on this box are by definition analog cable. Unfortunately, the world of digital cable (aka CableCard) in Windows is pretty ‘DRM’ scary: “The computer has to have a special bios and an additional product key [to use a CableCard reader]”. See lots of info here:
