Hi guys,
I'm looking at building a relatively inexpensive Home Theatre PC for mostly HD video streaming and Blu-rays and not gaming.
I'm also looking for a NAS box and surround sound for the PC.
My knowledge on the subject is limited so a run-down list of all the essentials that I'll need would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
First and foremost the HTPC is the top priority with the NAS secondary at this time.
If I could build the PC and purchase a decent NAS for under $1000 that would be ideal, but if that means skimping on quality I'm willing to hold off on the NAS and purchase that later down the line.
One-stop location for the laymen: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/rmp_sg_whirlpoolpcs
HTPC Builds here.
Despite Whirlpool suggesting the AMD A6, to me it is a little hit and miss. On one hand it's low power and great for your web-media, music and lossy stuff but it lags abit on lossless BD rips especially when you throw in DTS-Master tracks.
The fact that it tethers on lagging for BD, suggests some future proofing issues. In hind-sight I would've got one of the more powerful A8/A10? or just outright i3, wasn't much more cost.
Anyway $1000 is easy for PC and NAS if you use the HTPC as the NAS. Some people would NEVER do this, but I don't see why not especially since Windows is easy to use and full of community made applications. Easy upgrades too.
However adding in speakers and hardware is definitely impossible here.
Easily doable, secondhand AMP and Speaker combo for $250 (or less) leaving at least $750 for the PC/HTPC.
It's not going to be an HDMI amp, but who cares. You'll get a great quality older surround sound amp that will sound just as good with a coaxial or Optical connection.
I agree about used gear, forgot about that. But disagree about amps without HDMI, you'll be missing out on 5.1 LPCM (no 5.1 PC games) and if compatible: DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD; unless you are ok with just standard DTS/Dolby.
I would personally start off with the essentials. This is what you have to buy.
1) You want this to serve NAS purposes, so you need to work out how much storage you require and factor that in. As a starting point, I think 4TB is a good place to start. You can get a WD Green 4TB drive for around $175. You have to think about whether redundancy is important to you (i.e. whether losing your data is catastrophic) and whether that's worth paying for in your situation. Personally, to start off with, a 4TB drive is fine.
2) The CPU. Others might disagree, but I think with a healthy $1,000 budget you really should be looking at an Intel Core i5. You can sneak away with an i3, but when the i5 4460 is $225, you can't go wrong. You can pair this with any motherboard. Given that you're not doing anything demanding, any cheap H97 board should do the trick. Have a look at the $99 AsRock one. 8GB RAM is sufficient as well.
3) 120GB SSD for the OS is sufficient. They're like $70 these days. Make sure you get one.
Now, work out how much you have left and the extras you'll need to buy.
From rough calculations, you're looking at $650 for the above components. So you have $350 left over to play with. These are some items you may wish to consider:
4) GPU. Do you want to play games? The integrated GPU on the i5 is more than good enough for playing back 4K video…etc. If you want to play games, consider a nice graphics card to go in here as well. Personally, I would recommend the cheap and cheerful GTX 750 Ti. It's nice and quiet and will play all your modern titles at 1080p, not with max settings, but for Medium, it'll cope fine. This will set you back $150. This is the minimum I would spend, if you're not going to play games, don't get a GPU, anything worse than a 750 Ti is not worth buying.
5) Case and PSU. This is where your taste comes in. A 450W PSU is sufficient for this system even with the 750 Ti. So grab something cheap but reliable like the Corsair CX series. You should be able to pick one up for under $100. The left overs can be used on the case. Work out what sort of case you want and whether you'll be hiding your PC or displaying it. Silverstone make some really nice HTPC cases. If you're hiding it or you don't really care, just get a cheap Coolermaster case, they're great and are more than sufficient to house your parts.
Is the idea of the HTPC and NAS to be able to access media files for use in XBMC over a network?
I'd recommend, similarly to what is mentioned in some of the above posts, considering using the computer itself as a media server of sorts, with decent software available for Windows for a basic build that would probably allow all that you would want to do. Something like Plex Media Server (which works well on Windows) would be an ideal way to use a computer as both a media server and an HTPC, and no NAS would be required, allowing you to spend a little more on your PC build.
I'd tend to disagree with a couple of the above posts - I would recommend the AMD A8 7600 APU, due to its decent speeds, which have been reviewed as more than strong enough to play uncompressed Blurays, as it works as both a decent CPU, which competes with Intel Core i3 chips, and as an alright GPU - much better than that which is built into the Intel CPUs. This will save you getting a better GPU, as you indicated you have no desire to play games. Depending on your requirements, there's also a significant number of A88M motherboards, with a decent number of SATA ports for additional HDDs, and with the outputs you desire, with all including HDMI outputs, and some with toslink jacks built in if you have an older AV receiver.
In terms of storage, it is entirely up to you as to whether or not you want an SSD, though, were it to be running all day, every day, it would be advisable, as HDDs do take time to spin up when they go into a lower power state. For media streaming purposes, as well as for launching of media-centric applications, you won't necessarily notice the $70 of difference. +1 to paulsterio's suggestion of a WD Green HDD, though - if you did want additional reliability, also consider WD's Red range.
In terms of case and PSU, Silverstone & Antec make fantastic HTPC cases - I use a Silverstone LC10E, due to the space for 5x HDDs built in, but there are many options to suit your personal taste and requirements. A large number of cases include a PSU as well, though I would always recommend a separate purchase of an 80+ Gold 250W-450W PSU, depending on how many HDDs you wish to run.
The problem with buying into AMD is that you're buying into a DOA platform. AMD hasn't come up with anything new in a long, long time. To be honest, I think even they have accepted they cannot compete with Intel. With Intel, if you buy a Core i3 today, your platform is compatible straight up to the most powerful Core i7 CPUs. There's a good and strong upgrade path.
The problem with APUs is that they have no real intended audience. You either need discrete graphics or you don't, there's no in between where you "sort of" need discrete graphics. If you don't play games and don't need hardware acceleration for rendering or the like, Intel's integrated graphics are far more than enough. An APU adds nothing.
Realistically, though, the processor probably won't be upgraded in most HTPC builds for a fair period of time, and the AMD chip both does the job perfectly well, and costs significantly less than the Intel competitors - MSY has the A8 7600 listed at $119, vs $135 for the cheapest Core i3. While this isn't a huge difference in itself, CPU Passmark scores are within 2% of each other (when comparing the A8 7600 to a Core i3 4160), and the graphics are significantly better, with (sort of) more efficient power consumption - 65W TDP on the AMD, which automatically switches down to 45W, compared to 54W on the Intel chips.
I totally agree that there is not a huge amount of benefit with the AMD's more powerful GPU, but having GCN architecture with native Mantle support may come in handy one day (though I realise gaming is not the primary use of the computer), though some applications like Plex use the GPU to transcode on the fly to devices, which is a completely practical use for this APU.
The problem is Passmark isn't really a great benchmark because we don't know exactly what it is testing. If we look at other benchmarks, we can see that Intel completely dominates AMD on single-threaded performance.
Unfortunately (and yes, it is unfortunate), most computing is still not very multi-core optimised apart from rendering. This means that, at the moment, IPC is much more important than core count, so Intel CPUs are superior.
I'm not having a dig at AMD. I don't love or hate Intel or AMD. I buy based on what I think offers the best value and makes the most sense. I own an AMD R9 290, which I think is great value. Their CPUs, however, don't make too much sense at the moment.
The only real CPU I would consider is the FX 8350 at $215 or whatever it is now. It'll be much better at rendering than any Intel CPU around that price point. Apart from that, most other AMD CPUs are just not up to it.
While I completely agree that the Intel chips are objectively superior, the price point that the AMDs come at, with their more than acceptable performance for the appkication, makes them worthwhile in my opinion. I'm not a huge fan of AMD, I personally use Intel chips in two of my three computers, but as far as this build goes, I would personally choose the AMD for the relatively good price-performance.
Additionally, as the APUs are relatively popular in HTPCs, a lot of the motherboards that support them also provide media-centric features, including additional SATA ports, better HDMI outputs & toslink connectors for not much money.
Again, I totally agree on the Intel chips being substantially better, but being able to get a 45W chip, more than capable of all media tasks required here, for <$200 including the motherboard is pretty damn good.
So now I'm confused… Why is there still a need for a NAS?
From what I know, a NAS is
* Communal storage server for all your devices
* Low powered
* Can be kept on
But with $1000 you can make an i5 HTPC with low power usage and plenty of space.
I've never really understood the point of a NAS so could someone please enlighten me.
Basically, my point would be to build a good HTPC and forget about the NAS.
Always-on access to files..
Good for in-home streaming of music/video and automated backups..
For most people though, agreed it's unnecessary, or worst case, you have to go turn on the PC to then do all of the above.
Pretty much what I do… automated backups require the PC to be on anyway so regarding that isn't much of an incentive.
Basically you can build a HTPC with ~100-150w pull max so you should be able to leave those on for on-demand access for streaming and access as well.
Highly recommended to make a good quality HTPC with the $1000 rather then split it up and make a crap HTPC and get a crap NAS
I've had a lot thoughts about what I would like for a HT. I originally bought an Intel i5 NUC D54250WYK 15 months ago which was great and left thoughts about a NAS till later. Not long after that purchase Microsoft brought out the Surface Pro 2 and then after that they dropped the prices of the original Surface Pro down dramatically. I then quickly saw that the Surface Pro 1 was basically an Intel NUC with a touch screen and Wacom stylus with over a thousand different pressure levels fantastic for note taking and drawing plus being a tablet, laptop and HTPC. So I sold the NUC on eBay for $635 and bought the Surface Pro for $698 with touch keyboard at Harvey Norman. So there it sits doing its job day in, day out and when I travel I unplug the MBeat 7 port USB 3.0 + USB 2.0 Hub, the power and the Display port and away I go. The Surface Pro 1 with Windows 8.1 Professional is an outstanding piece of engineering and can be bought from eBay, used for about $425 with keyboard and probably not much more than a year old. It boots in seconds and has an Intel Core i5-3317U with HD 4000 graphics. It is without a doubt the best PC I've owned because of what it can do. I bought a NAS a few months later, the Lenovo Iomega ix2-dl which I installed 2 x 2TBs, WD HDDs. My thoughts on NAS are they are a headache and create much more problems than they solve. The HDDs cannot be taken out and added to another device PC as they operate with a non-windows OS and that itself creates even bigger headaches. I am in the process of putting mine on eBay for sale and have gone back to using a dual bay docking station for the 2HDDs. Like DVD's, HDDs are on the way to becoming extinct. I hope this proves to be of assistance.
I agree for the following
winRT/RT2/Pro/Pro2 at $200-500 are great value (love my RT as it cant get windows virus's and runs all the apps i want anyway, but Intel versions are ok too) but PRO3 at over $1k are to be avoided unless its making you money.
My netgear NAS has been a disaster, the ARM OS is a POShit! My experience with file management (or lack), corruption and lack of detection for drive faulure lost me 8TB of stored stuff, made me think the cloud is a better place to keep things IMO
Any cheap PC can handle some extra HD and most either have raid or can take a cheap PCI/PCIe raid card and windows saving grace is its easy to use and file sharing
I have a htpc on a N54L Microserver. 4gb ram, and room for 4x3.5" drives, a bluray player and a ssd for os. I run xbmc with lots of movies. No full bluray rips, as they are huge, but lots of 9-12gb 1080p mkv movies and its on most of the time.
I would suggest a cheap 120gb drive for os, 4gb ram, win8, an ati6450 card with hdmi out, and a bluray player (I have lg combo player with player software).
You can probably get that with a couple of 3tb dives for well under $1000.
You will need to be more specific, a home theatre pc is fairly basic and $1000 would cover that easy, however once you start talking NAS it becomes more complex and expensive. Did you want to get all this for under $1000?