The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

[Topcat]

Yea, coming from me, this should mean a lot.....hahaha.... I'm ashamed to admit I'm extremely out of the loop on the best of the best these days, I'm too busy keeping everyone's old broken crap working....

I'm in the design stages of an HTPC for my gameroom, to feed a 70" TV and an old legacy Marantz sound system. The goal is to playback my MP3 stash and DVD ISO playback via mapped network drive over a gigabit LAN. I also have satellite TV for my football, but that won't affect the HTPC, as the receiver will be directly connected.....so its goals are DVD and MP3 playback. No gaming, no web browsing, no nonsense....

Tell me your hardware suggestions.... planned OS will be win7 Ultimate. Case, the smaller the better. It will only need one small HDD for the OS, so a SSD would be my desire, all media files are stored on a server.

[goontron]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

Yea, coming from me, this should mean a lot.....hahaha.... I'm ashamed to admit I'm extremely out of the loop on the best of the best these days, I'm too busy keeping everyone's old broken crap working....

I'm in the design stages of an HTPC for my gameroom, to feed a 70" TV and an old legacy Marantz sound system. The goal is to playback my MP3 stash and DVD ISO playback via mapped network drive over a gigabit LAN. I also have satellite TV for my football, but that won't affect the HTPC, as the receiver will be directly connected.....so its goals are DVD and MP3 playback. No gaming, no web browsing, no nonsense....

Tell me your hardware suggestions.... planned OS will be win7 Ultimate. Case, the smaller the better. It will only need one small HDD for the OS, so a SSD would be my desire, all media files are stored on a server.

win7? im out..... i think i will go browse the betaarchive now.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

I'd say some sort of barebones for this... you don't need my HTPC on steroids obviously (Old ATX desktop case under the LCD, with black repaint and a silverstone 3.5" port array). Atom based would do. If I still had it I'd give you my p4 Shuttle Xpc to use.

[cheapie]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

I think a Raspberry Pi running OpenELEC or something should work just fine.

[Topcat]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

I'd say some sort of barebones for this... you don't need my HTPC on steroids obviously (Old ATX desktop case under the LCD, with black repaint and a silverstone 3.5" port array). Atom based would do. If I still had it I'd give you my p4 Shuttle Xpc to use.

Got plenty of ATX cases....the key I'm discovering is obviously an HDMI out and a good sound chip with lots of lineouts (subwoofer, front, rear, center). the audio system I'll be using is circa late 90's, its not a 70's relic, it has plenty of input choices. It drove a massive home theater setup in my parents house until he got a new bose setup....and this was given to me a couple years ago, just waiting for a good use....I personally think it sounded better than the 4000-dollar blose setup he bought, but that's just me...

[shovenose]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

My HTPC was a crappy AMD A4 APU in a Silverstone ML03 case. Worked just file until I turned it into a server lol.

[goontron]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

Got plenty of ATX cases....the key I'm discovering is obviously an HDMI out and a good sound chip with lots of lineouts (subwoofer, front, rear, center). the audio system I'll be using is circa late 90's, its not a 70's relic, it has plenty of input choices. It drove a massive home theater setup in my parents house until he got a new bose setup....and this was given to me a couple years ago, just waiting for a good use....I personally think it sounded better than the 4000-dollar blose setup he bought, but that's just me...

blose and Breaks by dre, none sound as good as my 71 zenith valve console or my soundesign.
hint.

[Topcat]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

blose and Breaks by dre, none sound as good as my 71 zenith valve console or my soundesign.
hint.

This is a marantz.....heavy transformers and powerful. Cerwin Vega speakers and an Energy active woofer (would love to find a mate to it, 2 is always better than 1). The old Zenith, I'll have to give that one a salute....but soundesign?!

[goontron]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

....but soundesign?!

its one of the half decent ones that if you beef it up its a really good unit. and beefed up it is

[c_hegge]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

My suggestion would be a Core i3 with just the onboard graphics. I'm assuming you would want a SuperMicro board, in which case the X10SLQ looks like a good option. It has HDMI out for the integrated graphics, as well as 7.1ch HD Audio with SPDIF out.

Otherwise, you could use something like a Core i3 Intel NUC with a 64GB mSATA SSD. Those do have HDMI output, although I don't know how good the Audio is.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

Got plenty of ATX cases....the key I'm discovering is obviously an HDMI out and a good sound chip with lots of lineouts (subwoofer, front, rear, center). the audio system I'll be using is circa late 90's, its not a 70's relic, it has plenty of input choices. It drove a massive home theater setup in my parents house until he got a new bose setup....and this was given to me a couple years ago, just waiting for a good use....I personally think it sounded better than the 4000-dollar blose setup he bought, but that's just me...

Sounds like you need a decent GPU (or a modern mainboard with onboard graphics) and a decent sound card.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

My suggestion would be a Core i3 with just the onboard graphics. I'm assuming you would want a SuperMicro board, in which case the X10SLQ looks like a good option. It has HDMI out for the integrated graphics, as well as 7.1ch HD Audio with SPDIF out.

Seconded. Forgot that modern boards had 7 channel audio. Doh!

edit- You could use a celeron for what's being done... I think.

[c_hegge]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

^
Yeah, but the price difference between a Celery and a Pentium Dual Core isn't much. For my own use, though, I don't like going much lower than i3.

[Topcat]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

X10SLQ

Ohh I'm totally diggin' that!!

I just remembered I have an Asus RoG Maximus2, with the sound add-on card. Has a C2D @ 2.2 and 8gb of ram. Got it in a goodie box some time back, works fine, but missing the IO shield......that might do the HTPC trick....

[c_hegge]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

I just remembered I have an Asus RoG Maximus2...

Shame on you!

ASUS gear is not allowed within a mile of my computers.

[Topcat]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

Shame on you!

ASUS gear is not allowed within a mile of my computers.

Hey, it was free, like any Asus should be....this is an HTPC remember, not one of my servers.... all it has to do is play music and movies....I hope it would be able to hack that....afterall, its full polymer caps! hahaha

[momaka]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

Well, for MP3 and DVD playback, you don't really need any kind of expensive hardware. Even a Pentium 3 with a decent video card will do (of course, do try to go with something better, really - unless you're doing it for kicks). Now if you want to play 720p and 1080p, that's when you need more serious parts "under the hood". Anything that's at least dual-core will be fine. But pick a CPU that has a lower TDP. That way, the CPU and the PC as a whole won't need as much cooling and thus you can have a more quiet system. Not to mention you can get away with a quiet low-wattage PSU this way. For graphics card - a Radeon HD2400 or HD3450 are good low-power options if the onboard doesn't have HDMI. IIRC, Radeon HD2400 and up have hardware H.264 decoding, so CPU will hardly be doing work with those. Not sure which series from nVidia correspond to those

Yeah, that sound system looked nice when I saw it in that "What I've been up to..." thread. If it's got digital inputs (S/PDIF, optical, etc.), use those vs. the analog L/R/C/Woofer outputs on the audio card. Probably not that much noticeable difference in the sound quality, but you'd have a lot less cables to deal with.

I'm thumping on a late 90's Yamaha RS-830 RX stereo amplifier, and I love it. I have a pair of Sony SS-MB215 speakers hooked to it as well as a pair of Realistic Nova-18 (ghetto reconned with paper). Using only one or the other due to amp impedance limitations, but both sound good. I switch between the two depending on what I want to listen to. Beats the hell out of any BOOOOse setup or cheap PC speaker setup with a woofer (IMO).

[TELVM]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

... It will only need one small HDD for the OS, so a SSD would be my desire, all media files are stored on a server.

SSDs are so cheap now that anything smaller than 120~128GB ain't cost-effective. For just HTPC OS I'd get something unexpensive like a Crucial M500 120GB. Create a partition of just 64GB for Se7en, so that there is a ton of unpartitioned space for overprovisioning and the IOPS remain always high (you can always extend volume from Se7en disk management in the future if you ever ran out of space).

Or if you need the current best, Samsung 840 Pro 128GB.


Don't forget to set SATA mode to AHCI in BIOS prior to installing Se7en.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

SSDs are so cheap now that anything smaller than 120~128GB ain't cost-effective. For just HTPC OS I'd get something unexpensive like a Crucial M500 120GB. Create a partition of just 64GB for Se7en, so that there is a ton of unpartitioned space for overprovisioning and the IOPS remain always high (you can always extend volume from Se7en disk management in the future if you ever ran out of space).

Or if you need the current best, Samsung 840 Pro 128GB.


Don't forget to set SATA mode to AHCI in BIOS prior to installing Se7en.

...and also install the intel RST driver, even if you're not using RAID. Other lise, at least for me (with an SSD), you'll have a crash-o-holic upon wake form standby.

[c_hegge]

Re: The Boss Stooge and a new HTPC

^
I don't have any RST software installed at all (just the intel chipset driver), and I've never had a problem with my SSD crashing when coming out of standby.