PC specs/building an ideal PC.

[The T]

Reposting this from a forum I frequent, figured I could get good advice here too...

I'm pretty sure I've made this topic before, but I'm returning to the idea again to ask for advice. I'm going to build a Media PC; essentially, a PC connected to my HDTV with (most likely) GameEx and XBMC installed. I want it to be able to easily play encoded HD video without a hiccup, and be able to play some higher end games, possibly even emulated PS2 or GCN games if emulation is that far along on them, or ever does become so in the future. I guess I'm not against having to upgrade it in the future, but I'll see where things take me/what I can do for now. So my questions, in general, are...

How do I know if CPUs and Motherboards are "compatible"? What should I even be looking for in both of these?

What do I need to know about cooling?

What kind of video card will I need, in terms of both having HDMI output and being powerful enough as I need it to be?

How can I find out about what pieces of hardware are going to be "quiet", outside of reading reviews? Same goes for actual form/size, and whether it will fit into a case I find, without physically seeing it. Maybe I'm dumb but I haven't found this information for most things.

And really, in general, what kind of benchmarks should I shoot for? How do I know what's high end or good enough.

Should I go back to using XP, or should I try out Windows 7? Not that I'll need to use the OS all that much, so my main concern is compatibility with both older and newer PC games.

And, er, anything else you think I should know?

To be honest, I wish I had a place like Fry's around me as I'm sure they could help. Anyone know of any places in Orlando/places that should be around the country that I might be able to find?

[sparky]

first sorry for my poor english, Im from Argentina

Ill give you some tips on best hardware for htpc...

VGA

Always look for vga cards that already come with aftermarket coolers for 10dls or 15dls more... never buy a card with reference coolers because they are noisy and dont dissipate heat well enough...

high end

-Sapphire 5850 Vapor X

-mainstream

Sapphire 5770 Vapor X / nvidia gtx260

-low end

Sapphire 5670 / nvidia gts 240

almost all ATI 5xxx series have Hdmi output, and consume less power than the nvidia counterparts

PSU

Coolermaster Silent Pro or any Power & Cooling, not too expensive and silent enough

CPU and MOBO

-high end

Intel i7 ... dont buy this overpriced piece of s***

-mainstream

Intel i3 or i5 (INTEL) with an H55 mobo

AMD Phenom II X4 with 785g, 790gx or 890gx mobo (this mobos have a nice integrated video that is fast enough for light gaming and 1080p video acceleration)

-low end

Intel e5400 (socket 775) with p45 mobo

AMD Athlon II x4 with 785g mobo

some good motherboard brands: asus, gigabyte, msi, etc

Look closely to the heatsink on the northbridge because they tend to get very hot and can be a pain when using a case with poor ventilation, so aim for those with big heatsinks with heatpipes on the northbridge and mosfets

There are dozens of good and silent aftermarket coolers for the cpu. Coolermaster, Thermalright, Thermaltake or Scythe, to name a few good brands.

If you plan to buy a small case, you can forget about ATX size mobos and aim for mATX mobos... and take measures of the big vga cards like 5850 or gtx260 and some aftermarket coolers are 12cm height so they cant fit in small cases.

My current htpc hardware is

Case: Coolermaster Elite 360

CPU: Athlon II x4 620

Motherboard: Gigabyte 785g

Memory: 2gb DDR3 1600

VGA: Sapphire 5670 with accelero cooler

LCD LG 32 1080p

I can play games like Street Fighter 4 and Mass Effect in medium to high settings, all emulators from mame to pcsx2 and dolphin, 1080p videos and so much more

again sorry for my poor english

[The T]

No problem at all! Your post was really informative.

I've started taking a look at things, and I found a small thing I'm confused about. What is the difference between this and this? That is to say, one has a higher L3 Cache and the other has a higher operating frequency, and also one us Dual Core while the other is Quad Core... what do each of those 3 things mean, what is important?

[bkenobi]

Not to be rude, but if you don't understand the difference between these CPU's, you are missing the fundamentals. Perhaps you could try doing a bit of research into what the terms mean. I highly recommend Tom's Hardware. They have been around FOREVER and have some very informative pages on CPU's, graphics cards, memory, etc.

As for your questions...

• L3 cache - the 3rd layer of cache on a CPU. A bigger number is better.
• Operating Frequency - the frequency the CPU runs at. This is a factor in how fast the processor is. Bigger is better, but the multiplier and voltage also factor into the actual speed of the processor.
• Dual/Quad core - the number of cores is basically a measure of how many CPU's you have. Back in the day, you would have multiple CPU's if you wanted more processing power on a server. Today, there are OS's and enough applications that can take advantage of multiple processors, so it's generally better to have a larger number of cores. HOWEVER, if you aren't going to use any applications that can use 2 or more CPU's, you will be wasting your money (to some degree).

Sounds like you need to do a bit more reading, but that should get you started.

[The T]

Well, I am a little bit new on this, as I said... I definitely feel like I understand the basics--of course I get that "more is better", I just wondered which of the 3 things that were listed were important, but I think I've gotten a general gist of it from else where.

I found a guide here that lists some general breakdowns for different levels of machine, and I kind of decided on this one...

AMD-AMD

System

CPU: Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition HDZ955FBGIBOX 3.2GHz AM3, $165.

CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS9500A LED, $47.

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H AM3 AMD 890GX chipset ATX, $121.

Memory: G.SKILL F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ DDR3-1600 2 x 2GB Kit, $105.

Graphics Card (ATI): SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5770 GDDR5 1GB, $160.

Graphics Card (NVIDIA): XFX GS-250X-ZDFU GeForce GTS 250 DDR3 1GB, $146.

HDD: Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640GB SATA 3.0Gbps, $65.

PSU: Enermax MODU82+ II 625W EMD625AWT II, $121. A cheaper alternative is Corsair TX650W CMPSU-650TX 650W, $90, or Enermax ECO80+ 620W EES620AWT, $91.

Case: Zalman HD503 ATX, with LCD/IR receiver/remote, $222.

Total Cost: $1006 for ATI, $992 for NVIDIA

The only question I have is that I'm not going to be using the 640 GB hard drive. I'd like to know, basically... well, as long as it's a SATA hard drive, I should be fine, right? I guess I've heard of like, larger hard drives (ie, 2 TB) being slower or having less performance, is that something I should worry about? How will it affect something like this, how noticeable will it be? Can anyone speak from experience on it, what kind of hard drives have you all used?

EDIT: And as another question, would it be in my best interest to go with Vista for this? I'm really used to XP so if XP would somehow be safer/easier, then let me know...

[bkenobi]

You can look up specs for specific hard drives (probably available on avs forums as well). Bigger hard drives can take longer to find files (latency), but there are other things that determine the speed of the drive as well. The big hitters are latency (for reading/writing small files primarily) and throughput (the actual sustained transfer speed). You can get very fast drives, but they will likely be much smaller and definitely cost MUCH more per TB (look up solid state drives). I think a lot of people would recommend 2 drives for a high performance large capacity system. Drive 1 would be a very fast (usually smaller) drive for installing the OS and applications on. The second would then be a storage drive that has enough space to hold all of your files (movies, music, etc). If you really want to add speed and a bit of security, you could even consider using a RAID for the storage system (I like RAID5 myself).

[The T]

Do you think with that case, it will be able to fit two hard drives? Also it just occurred to me I hadn't planned to have a CD drive in it, since the only thing I can think of I'd need it for is to install Windows...

[bkenobi]

According to this site:

http://www.quietpcus...se-P646C49.aspx

It has 3 internal 3.5" bays and 2 external 5.25" bays. That means that you can certainly have 2 hard drives in there. Heck, you can even have a slot between them open to allow for better air flow (a good thing).

Oh, and one other thing to keep in mind... If you want to, you can always add external drives to a system. This isn't the slickest method, but it definitely works!

[The T]

Thank you so much for your help! I definitely did consider expanding it in the future with an external drive, but I wanted it to be, at least at first, an entirely self-contained unit.

When I look at the pictures on that second site, it clues me in that... the things with the handles on them, I didn't realize those were where the hard drives were going to go, haha. Like, I didn't realize what those were for...

As far as hard drive setup goes, should I have one hard drive with the OS, GameEx, XBMC, and all the emulators on it, and the storage drive will have all the movies and ROMs on it? Think that would work best?

[bkenobi]

That would work. If you get two drives, one should be fast and one should be large IMO. If you can find drives that are both fast and large, you don't need 2, but you will probably pay more for the one drive than you would for 2 that meet the need.

Anyway, I would put the applications and OS on the fast one and the roms, movies, etc on the larger one. If both drives you are looking at have the same spec, it's a toss up if you need 2 or not. I personally have used 1 drive for my OS and apps and a second for files for YEARS and have been pleased with the setup. Personal choice though...

[The T]

So here's what I currently have in my cart, and is basically my preliminary final. So any thoughts, recommendations, changes, anything I'm missing, etc. give 'em to me now:

CASE: ZALMAN Black Aluminum / Plastic / Steel HD501 ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

MOTHER BOARD: GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H AM3 AMD 890GX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor Model HDZ955FBGIBOX

VIDEO CARD: SAPPHIRE Vapor-X 100283VXL Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

POWER SUPPLY: CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply

MEMORY: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ x2

FAN: ZALMAN CNPS9500 AT 2 Ball CPU Cooling Fan/Heatsink

NETWORK CABLE: BYTECC C6EB-7P 7 ft. Cat 6 Purple Enhanced 550MHz Patch Cables

MAIN HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160215A 160GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 3.5" Hard Drive (Perpendicular Recording) -Bare Drive

STORAGE HD: Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

CD DRIVE: LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model GH22NP20 - OEM

OPERATING SYSTEM: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Full

[bkenobi]

That motherboard is pretty fancy. It includes onboard HDMI video, but you also have a video card specified. Unless you are planning to use the onboard card for something, you might check to see if there's a MB that doesn't have video onboard to save some money (although from the looks of things, you don't consider money a limitter).

There's nothing wrong with those network cables, but there are cheaper alternatives if you are looking to buy quantity.

The Seagate drive seems rather old and outdated IMO. I have a lot of IDE drives that work fine, but I would seriously consider only using SATA at this point. I would personally look for something much faster if you are going with 2 drives ESPECIALLY since you are already dropping a fair bit of change on the rest. If the budget works for it, consider a solid state drive (SSD) for your system drive. I hear they are VERY FAST! Also, that Seagate might be loud...I don't know for sure though. The WD drive is probably a good choice for a second drive.

If you are going to spend this kind of money anyway, consider adding BluRay to the system. I don't know how available a combo BD + DVD-burner is, so that might be a problem. I know there are BD-burners out there, but they are quite a bit more than that DVD-burner you chose. Btw, that drive should be fine.

I'm no expert on HTPC's. These are just my opinions. If you want educated opinions, you'd have to wait for others or ask at AVS Forums.

[Tempest]

If Bkenobi is going to give uneducated opinions, then I am too.

I agree with the sata drives. My concern was the case. I found one at Newegg that had four internal drive bays for about $20 more.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112228

Then if you have a little extra money, put 3 2TB drives in it in a raid5 configuration (your MB has on board raid) that will give you 4TB of storage with redundancy. If you lose a drive, you can rebuild the data from the remaining 2 drives. Raid 5 will give faster loading as well, because it stores pieces of large files on all three drives, so the file will be coming in from all three drives at once.

Raid 5 does have slow write speeds, due to having to calculate, and write the parity (redundancy).

[bkenobi]

Agreed! As I said earlier, RAID is good. Be careful with MB based RAID solutions though. If you have a failure of your controller or change your MB for some reason, you may have a problem with continuing to use the array. Software based solutions are more flexible in that respect, but are certainly slower (according to reviews that I've read). A RAID card with a hardware RAID controller is the best option, but obviously adds cost (which can be significant).

I'm not saying don't use the MB's RAID setup, I'm just letting you know the risks and benefits.

[The T]

I'm still not really sold on RAID.. It seems like a lot of extra work and having to pay more... So would there be any guide to explain easily what I would need to do to get it working, to maybe help convince me? And how much slower would it be, how much of an inconvenience would it be to me just for that extra security?

Also, not sure if I like that second case... but I dunno. Would the Zalman one really not be able to hold that many drives? It looks like it would, but maybe I'm wrong.

[bkenobi]

RAID is NEVER slower than a single drive. Depending on how you set it up, it can be either the same speed or much faster. Building an array is not complicated unless you are doing some really fancy stuff. If you just use the MB based solution, you just turn the feature on in BIOS and enter the RAID setup. It SHOULD be easy to do with that Gigabyte board unless they changed things since I used it on my last system. There are lots of places to figure out what's the best setup for you (or if it is even a good choice).

Basically, there are a few types of RAID arrays people generally use:

• Combine a bunch of discs to make one large volume (JBOD). These don't have to be similar drives. No speed or parity benefit. Only makes a larger drive. If you lose one drive, you lose everything.
• Use 2 discs to provide parity (RAID 0). No speed benefit. If you lose a drive, the other continues to work and you lose nothing.
• Use 2 discs to increase speed (RAID 1). Much faster read/write times. If you lose a drive, you lose everything.
• Use 2 or more discs to provide parity and/or speed increase (RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0). This is a hybrid of RAID 0 and RAID 1. It's more complicated and you need to know what you are doing to pick the best option.
• Use 3 or more discs to increase speed and parity (RAID 5). This is not as fast as RAID 0, but it is faster than a single drive. It also provides parity so if you lose 1 drive of the array, you can continue working seamlessly. However, if you lose 2 drives before you replace that first bad one, you lose everything.

The best option depends on the intended use and your resources. I personally bought a hardware RAID controller and built a RAID 5 array in a dedicated file server.

Oh, check out wikipedia for more info and other choices:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[samo]

I was wondering if anyone is running GameEx on a nettop like the Acer Revo 3600 or Zotac Zbox? I want to be able to run Gameex, emulators up to N64 and PS1, and Hulu Desktop. I would really appreciate advice, I am on the verge of buying one but can't find out if these will run. Thanks!

[The T]

There are lots of places to figure out what's the best setup for you (or if it is even a good choice).

Well, like where?

[bkenobi]

The wikipedia link is a good place to start. It describes a LOT of info about the different types of RAID. It also gives pros and cons. If that's not enough, then you need to decide the primary function for the storage (potential RAID). If it's primarily for gaming/emulation, then there are discussion threads here and at BYOAC forums that have covered it. If it's primarily for movies/music/images, then that's more of a HTPC question and AVS Forums has a lot of really smart people who have answered this question before (I've done some reading there in the past). If it's for general file serving, then the wiki article really should be sufficient.

Anyway, if you want fast, you want a solid state or fast SATA drive. If you want cheap, you should either go with a single large drive (whatever is cheapest per TB) or multiple smaller drives (these can be left as single discs or combined with a JBOD RAID setup that your MB should support). If you want some redundancy, go with a RAID setup (probably RAID 5 or 1).

There have been libraries written on RAID, so just go to google and start reading!

[Tempest]

TomsHardWare gives reliable advice. (AFAIK no relation to Tom Speirs)

The truth of the matter is you can drive your self nuts building a new system. In the end, it comes down to what's important to you, and how much you are willing to pay. I set myself a budget, and then blew it by $200-$300 dollars. I'm still happy with my system though, so I don't regret it.

Edit: I have posted in the past that I unzip all of my images, so storage was important to me. I will try to post a vid today, just to show how fast images load, if you don't have to unzip them before playing.

Edit2: One thing you don't want to have to do with a raid 5 is to run out of drive space. To add more storage, the whole raid has to be reformatted!

[The T]

Right now, on my current budget, I'm really thinking I should put the RAID thing off... I can always do it one day in the future (even though it will probably mean restarting my storage as a whole).

Someone else suggested this as an alternative to save $80 on Windows, with I think the only downside being not having support from Microsoft if I need it. But, that's what the internet is for...

As far as one case VS the other, I just... really like the look of the Zalman one, so unless the Lian Li offers some other benefit I'm not seeing...?

I'm kind of at the very end of my budget here (my goal really was about $1200 and I'm closing in on $1500, don't want to go over that)... I'll look into other options on the smaller drive, but I'm really not sold on Blu-Ray since... I doubt I'd ever buy any.

[Tempest]

See, I was right about going $200 - $300 over budget.

[bkenobi]

RAID can be a headache, but it can be very good to. It doesn't sound like you really need it, so I would probably skip it. Tempest did bring up a good point about RAID 5 though. With pretty much all other true RAID solutions (JBOD isn't really RAID, it's spanning), if you want to expand the array, you must format and start over. With RAID 5, you can add a drive and tell the controller to expand to the new drive. It SHOULD take care of everything for you and just seamlessly show up as more storage (I've yet to try it, so I'm crossing my fingers that it works like this in practice).

[Draco1962]

TomsHardWare gives reliable advice. (AFAIK no relation to Tom Speirs)

The truth of the matter is you can drive your self nuts building a new system. In the end, it comes down to what's important to you, and how much you are willing to pay. I set myself a budget, and then blew it by $200-$300 dollars. I'm still happy with my system though, so I don't regret it.

Edit: I have posted in the past that I unzip all of my images, so storage was important to me. I will try to post a vid today, just to show how fast images load, if you don't have to unzip them before playing.

Edit2: One thing you don't want to have to do with a raid 5 is to run out of drive space. To add more storage, the whole raid has to be reformatted!

Or.. how about building a smaller system that will allow two smaller, faster hard drives and DVD RW - one for the OS and frequentlyy used apps, the other for your MAME collection.

For movies, videos, music and picture archives - put your money towards a NAS configuration with RAID 5, several larger (and somewhat slower) drives. You can make up for the lag you can get with the NAS by installing gigbit controllers on the PC, NAS and router that supports gigabit. This will allow you a place to backup your gaming rig as well as allow access to archived files from more than one PC or game systems that accept extenders.

[bkenobi]

Not to disagree (since that's what I did), but some people like to use there HTPC's as a file server as well. Deciding what you want in the end is a good start to your current build. If you just build something that works today, it might not fit into your final, overall vision. Doing that might waste money and, more importantly, time and effort. On the up side, I think you've gotten a lot of good feedback to at least help answer the questions you've posted.