[lloydsmart]

Hello!

I'm finally in a position to be able to start speccing out my new HTPC. This thread is basically just a way for me to run my ideas past the resident experts (poofy et al) before I take the plunge and order. However, before I get into the details of what I'm planning, I'll give a little background on the system I already have.

Basically, I started out with a half-htpc/half-pc. Bad idea I know, but I had no choice at the time. I installed XBMC, started frantically downloading stuff, and added hard drives as I needed them. Now I'm left with a gigantic mess. A very loud "monster" system with 7 HDDs in it, that sounds like a jet plane taking off!

Here are the current specs:

ASUS M3N78 PRO motherboard
AMD Phenom 9550 X4 Quad-Core CPU (2.2GHz)
4GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 RAM
LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray/HDDVD/DVDRW Optical Drive
Silverstone LC16M Case
2 x Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm SATA HDDs
2 x Western Digital 2TB 5400rpm green SATA HDDs
2 x Western Digital Caviar 320GB 7200rpm SATA HDDs
1 x Western Digital 3TB 5400rpm green SATA HDD (yeah, baby!)
1 x PCIe Silicon Image SATA card with 2 additional SATA II ports. (SIL 3132)
A decent Antec PSU whose model escapes me right now. ~550W.

This beast is connected via HDMI to a lovely Onkyo 705 receiver, which in turn is connected to my Hitachi plasma (hopefully due for an upgrade soon to a Panasonic, but I digress...)

I use this machine, with XBMC, to store bluray rips and hdtv rips mostly, with some SD stuff thrown in for good measure. At the moment it is just connected directly to my broadband router provided by my isp via 100 Base-T Ethernet.

The motherboard has an onboard Nvidia GeForce 8300 GPU, which includes a HDMI output that supports full 1080p, bitstream DD and DTS, and LPCM 7.1, so I have no need for an extra graphics card or sound card.

What I'm planning to do is take the guts of this machine and use them to create a server, which will either run Unraid or Ubuntu Server with FlexRaid. Haven't decided on that part yet. The parts will go into an old tower case I have lying around (apart from the bluray player, which will go into my new htpc).

I will save the Silverstone case and LG optical drive for my new HTPC, which is where I need a bit of help. I'm fairly convinced that the way to go, for me, is an Intel i3 and an Nvidia GT430. I'm dying to bitstream those HD codecs, and it seems like AudioEngine is just around the corner. Until then, I can mess around with DSPlayer on Windows if I get impatient. Also, the 3D support will be a nice future-proofing touch, as I do like the idea of getting a 3DTV some day.

Here's what I have so far for a new HTPC spec:
Intel Core i3-540
Zotac GeForce GT430 Zone
OCZ Vertex II 40GB SSD

What I'm looking for from the community are recommendations for:

• A suitable motherboard for use with XBMC Live (or possibly openELEC), that supports the i3 (LGA 1156), and Gigabit Ethernet.
  
• Some good DDR3 RAM for this machine, and an idea of how much is required to be able to run AEON well.
  
• A suitable PSU that is efficient, quiet, and modular. Yeah, that last requirement makes it a bit more tricky, but I just think modular PSUs are so much neater! Plus, it's gotta be good for air circulation.
  
• A gigabit switch that's good for home use.
  

So... any takers? Thanks in advance for any advice.

P.S. Sorry the post is so long. Got a bit carried away...

[poofyhairguy]

First of all, interesting thread. Your HTPC/NAS monster is the exact same path I went down at one point and why I tell people its a bad idea generally. As a heads up all your stuff is Unraid compatible if you want to turn that thing into a dedicated NAS like I did to clean up my mess. I will admit I don't know if the 3TB drive works yet, you might have to Flexraid.

Now onto your direct questions:

What I'm looking for from the community are recommendations for:

A suitable motherboard for use with XBMC Live (or possibly openELEC), that supports the i3 (LGA 1156), and Gigabit Ethernet.

THE best mobo in that market:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6813128421

Some good DDR3 RAM for this machine, and an idea of how much is required to be able to run AEON well.

Aeon is all about CPU, which an i3 has enough of. 2GB of ram is fine, and with that mobo you can still get 1GB sticks (cheaper) and have the option for 4GB later. I love Corsair memory:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product

A suitable PSU that is efficient, quiet, and modular. Yeah, that last requirement makes it a bit more tricky, but I just think modular PSUs are so much neater! Plus, it's gotta be good for air circulation.

How much are you willing to spend? Here is modular and silent:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product

A gigabit switch that's good for home use.

Honestly there are tons of these. I like Dlink Green switches, but most are acceptable.

[lloydsmart]

Thanks for the recommendations - exactly what I needed. That PSU is a little pricey but I guess that's what I get for being picky.

I should, however, have specified that I am in the UK, so I need suppliers that either ship here or are based here. The recommendations are still great though, and I can always google model numbers to find UK suppliers.

What do you think of the CPU choice? I figured the 540 was so close in price to the 530 that there was no point choosing the lower model for the sake of literally a few £, but would it be worth moving up to the 550 or 560, or possibly even an i5? I will be playing youtube and flv on this occasionally, so I need it to be up to scratch with non-vdpau/dxva compatible playback.

As for the switch, I'll look at the Dlink greens, but it's good to know that pretty much anything will do. Are there any you know of that I should specifically avoid?

Thanks for all your help!

[lloydsmart]

Ok, I've ordered a GA-H55M-UD2H motherboard, and the rest of the bits will be ordered soon.

One think I may have overlooked is the CPU cooler. I need something really quiet but also effective. In the past, I've used water-cooling, but I sense that might be overkill for this sort of project.

Any recommendations? This is one area of PC building I'm really not too great with...

[maxinc]

In that case should fit pretty much any cooler but I prefer the Arctic Cooling because they are very cheap and virtually inaudible. I have this on a 6 core i7 and you can't here a thing.

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/product...7-pro-rev2

Also browse the website for other quiet goodies in the UK. I'm thinking of ordering a Xilence PSU from them.

[lloydsmart]

Well, the build is finally complete, and I'm very happy with it! Here's the final spec:

Intel Core i3-540
Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H (as recommended by Poofy)
Zotac GeForce 430 GT Zone (fanless!)
Corsair Hydro Series H50 CPU Water Cooling Kit
Nesteq ASM X-Zero 400W PSU
Corsair CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 XMS3 4GB (Cheap!)
Kingston SS100S2/16G
LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray/HDDVD/DVDRW Optical Drive
Silverstone LC16M HTPC Case
Windows 7 Home Premium

This is attached to my Onkyo 705 HDMI receiver, which is in turn attached to my brand new Panasonic TX-P50VT20 3D HDTV!

With this setup, I'm hoping in the not-too-distant future to achieve nirvana. I.e. Full 1080p 24Hz video playback via DXVA on the GT430, with HD Audio Bitstreaming to my amp via the new AudioEngine, with support for playing back 3D blurays in full resolution by using PowerDVD as an external player for Bluray discs.

I have also built a server from my old HTPC and some new parts. Check it out:

ASUS M3N78-PRO
AMD Phenom 9550 X4 (2.2GHz)
Stock AMD CPU cooler
4GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 RAM
Antec TruePower 650W Modular PSU
El-Cheapo pc case that I had lying around
1 x Western Digital 3TB 5400rpm green SATA HDD
2 x Western Digital 2TB 5400rpm green SATA HDDs (SATA 300)
1 x Western Digital 2TB 5400rpm green SATA HDD (SATA 600)
2 x Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm SATA HDDs
2 x Western Digital Caviar 320GB 7200rpm SATA HDDs
1 x Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10k RPM HDD (SATA 600)
PCIe ASROCK SATA-600 Controller Card
PCIe Silicon Image SATA card with 2 additional SATA II ports. (SIL 3132)
CoolerMaster 4 in 3 HDD bay with fan

This beast runs the newest beta version of Unraid Pro (currently 5.0b12a), with the Raptor as a cache drive, and the 3TB currently acting as a parity drive, giving me a total of just under 9TB usable space!

I also have a TV card in the server (Hauppauge HVR-4000) and I've been playing around with getting TVHeadend to work on Unraid. I did actually get it working perfectly on my friend's server, with xmltv and everything, although he had a different TV card, and it was an older version of Unraid.

Still, I've got my fingers crossed for this as it really would be the ultimate HTPC experience, wouldn't it? All movies and TV Series stored on server, with a MySQL database serving them. DVB-S2 and DVB-T inputs to server controlled by the PVR branch of XBMC. All TV recordings saved to the Unraid array. This is what I've set up for my friend and it is fantastic! Also, with Aeon MQ3 now bringing in support for PVR stuff - it will really look fantastic too!

As you can tell, I'm quite excited. I've been striving to achieve this kind of setup for literally YEARS, and it's finally starting to come together!

Future Plans:
Once the server and the main frontend are all sorted out, I may look into getting some more frontends for other rooms in the house, but these won't be self-builds, and won't be anywhere near as fancy as what has been done so far.

First of all, they won't need 3D, or HD Audio. But they will need to playback HD content over HDMI (possibly even 1080p, if I can get a good deal on a 32-inch LCD), and they'll have to cope with the PVR stuff aswell, including HDTV channels which means de-interlacing 1080i occasionally. They may also be required to playback DVDs too, from time to time, so an optical drive is required. (But not Bluray necessarily).

I was initially thinking ATV2, but the lack of 1080p output puts me off those. I'm looking more towards small ION2 systems now. Any thoughts?

Thanks for looking!

[eskro]

Intel Core i3-540
Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H (as recommended by Poofy)
Zotac GeForce 430 GT Zone (fanless!)
Corsair Hydro Series H50 CPU Water Cooling Kit
Nesteq ASM X-Zero 400W PSU
Corsair CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 XMS3 4GB (Cheap!)
Kingston SS100S2/16G
LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray/HDDVD/DVDRW Optical Drive
Silverstone LC16M HTPC Case
Windows 7 Home Premium

16 GB SSD?
Windows7 wont fit on it,,,,

[lloydsmart]

I've done it and it does. You're right, it is a tight fit though. Only 1GB free. But that's more than I need!

Tricks that help:
Turn off System Restore
Turn off PageFile
Remove unused windows features (like Media Player, MSIE, etc.)