Jason's HTPC Build Log

spirit

spirit

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So as you some of you may know I recently built a little HTPC with Dad to go underneath the TV to record TV and play Blu-rays and also to access the internet to watch online demand services to replace all of our various 'boxes' underneath the TV with one thing that was relatively small and did everything. Eventually we want to put some HDDs in this and turn it into a little server too

In the end we went for:
- Intel Core i5 4460
- Gigabyte GA-Z97N-WIFI
- 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 2x8GB
- Cooler Master Elite 130
- Corsair CX430M
- LG Blu-Ray RW
- TBS 6281 Dual-Tuner TV Card
- Samsung 850 Pro 256GB

And:
- Windows 8,1 Pro with Media Center
- CyberLink PowerDVD 14 Ultra

Overkill? I'll let you decide but we went for the i5, 16GB RAM and the 850 for several reasons:

1) Because the board is mITX, there is only 1 expansion slot on it. This is occupied by the tuner, so we needed the best onboard graphics we could lay our hands on so we went for the i5 4460 because at £110 it was an affordable quad-core with decent onboard graphics that are more than capable of playing a Blu-ray and can support up to 4K resolution meaning that when we replace our 1080p TV with a 4K one we'll still be fine.

With it being a quad-core it is future-proof and also decent enough for encoding video. This is something that we may end up doing on it.

And we like Intel. No AMD, please. ;)

2) The board only has 2 DIMM slots, so why not fill them? And 1600MHz was actually more expensive than 1866. By default it only ran at 1333 but after a few tweaks in the BIOS it's going at 1866 (enabled XMP memory profile).

3) We like our SSDs. We've used a fair few of them now and wanted to try out the Samsung 850 Pro with it being one of the newest and fastest SSDs on the market. 256GB is a nice size. Future-proof enough and easily holds a Windows install. :)

So here are some photos. :) Click for full res on Flickr.

Board, CPU and RAM all installed:





As you might be able to see from the photos, the front panel cables on this case are stupidly long considering that this is an mITX case and that cable management opportunities in this case aren't great. I thought that was a bit silly.

TV tuner card installed in the PCI Express x16 slot. This is the only expansion slot on this (and all!) mITX boards.



And here is how the final thing looked. Note the lack of cable management at this point in time - we just threw the build together and tested to see if it worked before I tidied it all up. It did work! First time too! (We are 'oh sooo experienced!' ;) )



I had hoped that by buying a semi-modular power supply I'd be able to cut down on the cable clutter but sadly not. The SSD sits underneath the optical drive and whilst that's fine, it's too far from the optical drive to use the same SATA power cable, so both SATA power cables had to be used. The fan on the side of the case can connect via fan headers, but sadly the intake fan on the front has to connect via molex. In the end only one cable was saved by going modular - the graphics card PCI Express cable. Oh well. We'll be putting two HDDs in this and RAID'ing them soon anyway I suppose.

But to save space inside the case the PSU does stick out of the back a little which isn't a bad idea.



You can see the birds' nest of cables in the shot below! ;)



The all-black design of the case is nice and the meshed front bezel is also a nice touch. However the best thing are the two USB 3.0 ports on the left and the USB 2.0 port on the right which is ideal for mice/keyboard/Bluetooth dongles.



Installing Windows 8.1 onto the Samsung 850 Pro took about 10 minutes or so and the SSD boots Windows is under 10 seconds. It is the fastest SSD I've ever personally benched, but looking at my Drive Speed Thread the leaderboard would suggest that in some cases it is actually a tiny bit slower than the 840 EVO (but it's a bit faster than the 840 EVO in my ThinkPad it seems).

We installed 8.1 at Dad's desk. You can see how small the PC is (relative to the size of other PCs, of course!)



And once Windows 8.1 had installed and we'd had a play around with using Windows Media Center to watch and record TV (dead simple!) I did some tidying up of the cables. I did as best as I could - basically zip-tying and twisty-tying would I could. Cable management in this case is not the easiest - not helped by the fact that the front panel cables are so long!

The little keyboard/trackpad is what we're controlling this PC with. It cost £8 from eBay and does the job nicely but sometimes the mouse lags a bit especially when sitting a few feet away from the TV! ;)







So there we go!

It was an interesting build and works really well with the TV and sits nicely in the TV stand where the Blu-ray player and PVR once used to live.

The build went relatively smoothly with the only problem being a weird grinding noise coming from the CPU cooler when we first built it. When I tidied the cables up we discovered the CPU cooler power connector was grinding on the fan, and so we moved the cable.

We were impressed at how well the TV card worked with our aerial and Windows Media Center. It came with a little aerial and using this WMC found 32 channels, but upon plugging it into the aerial on our roof it found 143! It's very easy to record and playback recorded TV in WMC.

I have PowerDVD 12 Pro on my desktop. I'm impressed by how much faster and more responsive 14 is. That's a nice upgrade! :D

Any comments or questions leave them here! :)
 
Nice Jason, did you find it easy to build ?

I built a mini itx system a few years ago and was surprised how easy it was to build given how tightly packed it is.
 
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It wasn't too hard to build at all but plugging some of the cables into the board proved to be a challenge due to lack of space (and not helped by high RAM sticks - we had to remove them several times!) and of course cable management wasn't the easiest of tasks in a case like this but these are downsides that every mITX case will have.
 
Denther said:
Looks awesome. Wish my dad would spring for something like this.
Click to expand...

Haha thanks. My Dad works in IT (self-employed too) so he has the same enthusiasm as me - and the same love for Intel CPUs, SSDs and high-end systems. :P
 
Lucky you, my dad pretends to know stuff about hardware, but he actually knows quite a bit about software, he grew up with Windows NT (old)
 
My dad helped me build my first system but my abilities and confidence are way past his now. He knows a decent amount but I'm definitely more capable at fixing problems than he is.
 
That sounds like a pretty awesome father/son type of thing to do.

Seems like it turned out pretty well, how are you liking it?
 
beers said:
That sounds like a pretty awesome father/son type of thing to do.

Seems like it turned out pretty well, how are you liking it?
Click to expand...

Cheers! We always build our PCs together and we've even done work on big servers together for his customers. He's awesome. :D I suspect the next PC we build in this household will be a new one for my brother to replace his Q8300 machine (which was Dad's before he upgraded to an i7!)

The PC is working really well! We have scaled Windows up in the Display Properties to make using it on a large screen much easier (but the res is still 1080p) and we've also scaled Google Chrome up to 110% or so to make using the browser easier. We're very happy with how easy it is to record TV on Windows Media Center with the TV Tuner Card we bought and of course we're enjoying watching on-demand TV on it through Chrome. ;) We're glad we went for the i5 because we found a way to encode the WTV files to MP4 so having the quad-core and the RAM helps with that.

All in all a good build. I'd recommend all of the parts we bought but I didn't realise just how tall those Corsair Vengeance sticks are! They're taller than my RipJaws-X! Luckily they fit fine in the case with plenty of headroom to spare. The case is good but the length of the front panel connector cables is annoying. The board is excellent. Has two HDMIs and Wi-Fi built right in. Really cool! :D

As you can see, it fits under the TV quite nicely. The black box on the shelf above it is our old TV Recorder (PVR) that we'll be getting rid of once we have got all of our recordings scheduled in Windows Media Center on the HTPC. :)

 
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Looks really nice Jason,Good job. ;)

Looks like your motherboard was easier to put in than mine,Had a right nightmare getting mine into the case because of the bulky box on the back of the power button/front connections..then the board kept getting stuck on the rear I/0 panels grounding clips. :D
 
Thanks. :D

Yeah this board wasn't too difficult to place into the case. The hardest part was probably plugging in the cables like the front panel cables and the SATA cables and so on.
 
Little update on the project!

We bought a 4TB Caviar Green to go in this PC. I was at school when it arrived and Dad installed it whilst I was at school. Apparently it went in really easily and of course when I was doing the cable management I was anticipating that we would be installing a HDD or two in here so I left some SATA power cables free. ;)

We went for the Caviar Green because it's big, well-priced (~£90) and also economical and frugal which is good because the HTPC is on 24/7.

All of our files (photos, music, company documents and so on) have been stored on a little server that Dad and I built three and a half years ago. The server was also our Exchange email server but since switching to Office 365 email (cloud) a few weeks ago, this has just been a file server. The data is stored on a couple of WD Caviar Green 2TB disks in RAID-1 as well as a 3TB NAS in the garage. We brought the NAS in last weekend, formatted it and then used SyncToy to copy the data from the disks in the server to the NAS again.

We then uploaded the data on those disks to Dad's DropBox account - the first cloud storage service we are using to backup.

When the 4TB Green arrived, we installed it in the HTPC and then used SyncToy to copy the data across to it. We are currently in the process of uploading the data to OneDrive for Business which is the second cloud storage service we're using.

Of course, DropBox and OneDrive sync folders mean that any new files will automatically be uploaded to the cloud.

Currently we have Windows Small Business Server 2011 on the server which is a bit slow. I think Dad is keen to install Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard onto it and continue to use it as a file server and also as a Hyper-V server.

So as well as holding our TV recordings and films, the little HTPC also holds a copy of our personal data too. :D
 
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