The HTPC Thread - Dont buy an HTPC - The Something Awful Forums

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V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

Kepp posted:

ASUS M2A-VM HDMI Socket AM2 AMD 690G uATX AMD Motherboard

I know very little about modern processors but from what I've read I think it should do what I want. Does anyone have any experience with the processor and/or onboard video?

What should you consider when looking at motherboards?

I'm thinking I want the sound handled by the motherboard which means an S/PDIF out on the motherboard but I'm not sure if chipsets are a factor or what.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2007 20:25

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:35

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

Crackbone posted:

Any motherboard from the past few years will have acceptable onboard sound. The big trick is getting it to be properly handled by Windows/your receiver.

Long story short, it can be a real pain to get unprocessed 5.1 output from a SPDIF connection to a receiver for every application. I eventually ended up letting the chip/dvd software do the decoding and running 5.1 sound out through the analog ports to my receiver.

I think my other consideration is a quiet motherboard.

edit: Is there a noticeable difference going out from analog ports as opposed to a coaxial?

Odoyle posted:

Agreed with the above poster. And your build goals are essentially how I started out with my target HTPC, but I ended up wanting to add PVR functionality and stuff.

I think for x264/avi 720p playback you're looking at getting a good codec (CoreAVC), a minimum 3.0 GHz processor, and about a gig of ram. I don't know what the current deal is on the video card market, but anything with DVI out should be good.

Is a 3 GHz processor really necessary? I thought the huge processing power was necessary just because a lot of the processing for the HD codecs used to be done by the processor. Newer video cards were supposed to take the load of processing h.264 codecs.

Or am I completely off-base?

V-Men fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Apr 26, 2007

# ¿ Apr 25, 2007 23:52

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

Crackbone posted:

As for what processor you need... the requirement now isn't a big deal. The 8500/8600 series cards I mentioned earlier are confirmed to eat x264 processing for lunch. There are tests showing those cards let you process 1080p x264 video on a Semperon 2800 without maxing the processor.

My personal preference is still the Athlon x2 series, mainly because of the price/performance sweet spot. You can get an x2 3800 for 65 bucks from Frys right now, which will more than handle windows and give you some headroom for growth.

Yeah, I'm with you on the processor part. Now, as for video card, I was under the impression that the 7600 series can also handle the majority of x264 processing. Is that correct?

# ¿ Apr 26, 2007 17:29

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

Crackbone posted:

Okay, here's a brief rundown -

You've got two main types of HD - VC1 and x264. VC1 is much less processor intensive, so for the purposes of this we'll concentrate on x264 - which is Blu-Ray and Quicktime HD video mostly.

With no video card involvement, and the processor doing all the decoding, even the best processor is hard pressed to handle 1080p x264 video. 720p is quite a bit easier, but still pretty intense.

Now, Nvidia came out with "Purevideo" starting with the 6600 series, which was supposed to offload some of the video processing burden. Long story short, the drivers and software which were supposed to do this never really matured, and it takes something short of voodoo magic to see any real improvements. For example on my athlon 64 3500+ with a 7800GT, it does 720p at about 60-80% usage, and it's 100% with dropped frames all over the place on a 1080p source. My friend, who has a Core 2 Duo overclocked to 3.2Ghz and a 7900GT has 50% usage on both cores to run 1080p. So the 7xxx series and below really don't do anything worthwhile to help high def-decoding.

The new "HD Purevideo" they launched has some specific requirements, that being Vista, an 8800, 8600, or 8500 series card, and software capable of utilizing HD Purevideo (like PowerDVD 7.3).
But with that stuff in place the gains are incredible.
My friend went from 50% usage on both cores to 5% usage with an 8500 for the same 1080p material. Tests are showing that chips as low as a Semperon 2800 can run 1080p sources with only 20% CPU usage or so.

Unless you're wanting to game with your HTPC, it's a better investment to get a mid-range processor, and take the money saved towards an 8500 card.

Well, I guess my TV is only good for 720p / 1080i anyway so I guess I really won't worry about 1080p source material. Thanks for the info though. I'm slowly piecing together what I need.

Also, I read on some other forum about the 8600s only being able to decode x264 in Vista.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2007 04:45

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

I didn't realize some of the 8500s and 8600s were so cheap. Bit of a downer about waiting on the XP drivers for Purevideo though.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2007 03:18

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

WTFBEES posted:

Any thoughts/opinions on Woot's offering tonight?

http://www.woot.com/

I've been contimplating building a fancy looking HTPC, but that's pretty dang cheap.

It's a Compaq, which turns me off right there.

Aesthetically, it's a tower, albeit a nice looking tower. If you don't mind a tower pc in your home theater setup, than it looks alright.

The video card is very meh and it looks like you'll be relying on the processor for all your HD codec needs which even a 2.4 Ghz should be hard pressed to process 1080p without system drag. I could be wrong though.

# ¿ May 2, 2007 15:23

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

So, I think this is what my HTPC will be:

Case: Silverstone SST-GD01B-MXR
Motherboard: Asus M2N-E Socket AM2
Video Card: GIGABYTE GV-NX86S256H
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz
Memory: Transcend JetRam 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800

Is the heatpipe on the video card worth the price? Or can the case that I picked keep the machine cool enough on the inside so that I could get the 8500? HDCP compliance is pretty much the key figure here.

# ¿ May 3, 2007 03:59

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

I just measured my TV stand and realized that there are very few htpc cases that will fit in there :doh:

# ¿ May 4, 2007 12:06

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

Well, I'm down to the power supply unit I want to get. I'm thinking the Silverstone ST40F solely because it has six SATA power connectors. Is there anything else I should be considering?

# ¿ May 16, 2007 12:14

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

FidgetyRat posted:

I am a man who appreciates efficiency, noise reduction, and reliability. For an HTPC, I don't think you should need more then 300 watts personally. having the "next best thing in gigantic PSUs" typically leads to unused power and alot of extra plugs to try to tuck away somewhere. Not to mention the excess cooling and typically louder fans. (based on personal experiences)

Yeah, mainly I need at least three SATA power connectors and the motherboard supports up to six SATA devices, so I figured, "Hey, why not get a PSU with six SATA power connectors, just in case I end up using all six connections?"

# ¿ May 16, 2007 21:19

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:35

V-Men: Aug 15, 2001; Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

Crackbone posted:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+(65W) Windsor 2.0GHz Socket AM2 Processor Model ADO3800CSBOX $79.00

Are you using the default heatsink and fan that came with this?

# ¿ May 25, 2007 02:14

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