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First HTPC - Could you tell me what you think please?

G

giorgio652

Junior Member
Hi. I am building a HTPC for a friend for the first time. I have put together a spec and would really appreiciate your opinions on the combination of parts.

Requirements are as follows:

  • As quiet as possible
  • Ability to watch and record HD simultaneously
  • Make use of external storage and blue-ray drive
  • Fairly future-proof

My friend has chosen his preferred case, and the TV-tuner card seems to be practically the only option when it comes to dual tuner HD cards. The spec I have proposed is as follows:

S10v case
BlackGold BGT3620 Tv Card

Asus P8H67-M R3.0 Motherboard
Intel Core i3 2120 3.3GHz Processor
Corsair 4GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
Corsair 120GB Force SSD
Antec 380W EarthWatts Green Power Supply
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit with a probable dual-boot with XBMC

Sandybridge should do the trick performance-wise, and USB-3 should help file transfer speeds from external drives. The stock CPU fan should be fine in Auto-mode, the PSU is quiet, and I can under-volt the case fans if necessary but i cant imagine it will run very hot anyway.

All together it is going to cost around £1100 (expensive case!).

I am in the UK, planning to purchase this week, no plans to OC & prefer intel.

What are your thoughts? Have i missed anything that would be a slightly better fit? Many thanks.
 
You might want to consider a mechanical drive instead of the SSD. The SSD is silent, but you will not really take advantage of the better performance in a HTPC, and the limited number of writes on the SSD might be a problem in a HTPC setup if you record to the drive.
 
oynaz said:
You might want to consider a mechanical drive instead of the SSD. The SSD is silent, but you will not really take advantage of the better performance in a HTPC, and the limited number of writes on the SSD might be a problem in a HTPC setup if you record to the drive.
Click to expand...

OK, that's a new one to me! Damn.

I've just googled it, and it seems this problem was exaggerated to begin with, and in the years that have passed the technology has improved and even worst case scenario new flash based SSD's will last 20 years. Is this not the case?

Thanks for your input, its exactly this reason I posted before buying 🙂
 
Once SSD is filled up, its performance will be impacted. You can look at some of the reviews done on SSD on Anandtech. You can cut down some cost by going with traditional hard drive rather than SSD. Besides, traditional SATA hard drive should hold you a while till SSD drive price.😉
 
Get a 40GB SSD for your boot drive and get 2x2TB HDDs for recording. I have Samsung Spinpoint F4's and have no problems with noise whatsoever.
 
I agree with the other posters. You don't want an SSD as the only drive in a machine with a TV tuner. I would not be worried about the SSD's lifespan. I would be worried about only having a 120GB drive when 720P content is about 8GB per hour.
 
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