Kodi Community Forum

Hey Guys,

Needed some input on putting together a HTPC with some out of the norm requests. Had it not been for these requests i would of gone with one of stickies.

To give you an idea of what im coming from, currently we use an ATV2 with XBMC. I'm feeding it through an aging dinosaur consisting of P4 3.5 with roughly 1.75TB of space. This tower does most of the work in the house, it runs uTorrent 24/7, never gets shut off. Runs PS3 Media Server (has been rendered useless lately), a seperate media server for the two Touchpads in the house, plus Air Video of the iOS devices. It also occasionally transcodes some videos for the portable players. No keyboard or display i log in remotely. And i wanted to add a Tuner card to stream to some of the iPods and iPhones in the house. We have a big house and to give you an idea right now we have 5 iphones, 3 ipods, 3 tablets, and 4 laptops, and 3 PS3s, and one Xbox 360. Plus the tower itself.

Now this has been an after thought up until i needed to upgrade a few components. I only have two sata ports on the MB so i needed a PCI card and at least another two TB of storage. Plus $100 on a good AGP video card ( i.e. ATI 4650). See where im going with this? Im about a quarter way into building a new system. Plus this thing is power hungry.

Plus i really want all my media nice and organized with their metadata which means id have to double the storage at least for the Bittorrent side as i seed ALOT.

Now in reality it never does EVERYTHING at once, but i'd like to prepare for a worse case scenario.

So thats that....

In essence it needs to be lower power, be able to multi task, and transcode full 1080P, with 5.1 Audio. Im thinking it needs 4 cores to do everything well and not half ass it.


And a big thank you to the community for helping me out on this.....

So, whatcha think?

when u say ---> building a new system

you mean, building a new SERVER only pc?

or u mean, building an HTPC which acts as a server too?

eskro Wrote:when u say ---> building a new system

you mean, building a new SERVER only pc?

or u mean, building an HTPC which acts as a server too?

HTPC which acts as a server occasionally. In reality it only serves media maybe 20% of the time. Excluding the ATV2 which the new system in question will be taking the place of.

Sounds to me like the latest intel "i core" setup fits your bill.
XMBC will only use 2 cores, so a hyper-threaded quad could be utilized for other tasks.
Socket 1175 motherboards vary by what they specialize at. I know one of them is better at the transcoding stuff but I don't remember which. The z68 series was added to supposedly utilize the full potential of the i cores. ie. "do everything" rather than specialize in just one thing. In any case, there is a wide range of choices and likely even an "older" ie less expensive H61 series will do everything you need it to.
On power, they throttle back when idle and only go to full power use when needed so they are great for 24/7 systems. It will likely use less power at full throttle than the P4 at idle?
I am sure AMD has their equivalents. Someone more familiar with AMD products will likely comment on those.

outatouch0 Wrote:Sounds to me like the latest intel "i core" setup fits your bill.
XBMC will only use 2 cores, so a hyper-threaded quad could be utilized for other tasks.
Socket 1175 motherboards vary by what they specialize at. I know one of them is better at the transcoding stuff but I don't remember which. The z68 series was added to supposedly utilize the full potential of the i cores. ie. "do everything" rather than specialize in just one thing. In any case, there is a wide range of choices and likely even an "older" ie less expensive H61 series will do everything you need it to.
On power, they throttle back when idle and only go to full power use when needed so they are great for 24/7 systems. It will likely use less power at full throttle than the P4 at idle?
I am sure AMD has their equivalents. Someone more familiar with AMD products will likely comment on those.

I was thinking an i3 with room to move to an i5 if needed.

Eninety2 Wrote:I was thinking an i3 with room to move to an i5 if needed.

Thats fine if you want to go that route. For me, I generally hate buying something when I already know what I want to replace it with.
i3 runs about $130 range
i5 runs in the $180 range
This i5 is $50-60 more upfront however, replacing the i3 is a loss of $130

i3-2105 should be all u need,,,,

Transcoding 1080p - yeah, I'd defo go with at least an i5 there, particularly if there's a chance you may need to be transcoding 2 or more 1080p streams at once.