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Is this processor/motherboard a good combo for my HTPC build?

R

Ronstang

Lifer
I'm looking at getting an i5-4690K and a ASRock Z97 Extreme 4 LGA 1150 ATX for my HTPC build. The main reasoning I have for so much horsepower is I will be installing a Ceton InfinitiTV6 tuner card so I would like to in theory be able to record 6 HD channels at once and although I was looking at getting an i3 processor I just don't know if it would have enough horsepower. The i5 combo is on sale for $293 out the door so it's not super expensive but about a $100 premium over the i3. I will start out with 8 gigs of RAM.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated since I'm an old geek who hasn't been into hardware since I built the machine I'm typing on in 2008!

Thanks
 
Nothing wrong with that really, those old Core 2s still have a good bit of life of them especially if you aren't gaming. Looking at Ceton's page and the requirements for the card you should actually be fine with an i3. You'll only need an i5 if you plan on running more than 3 extenders to go with your 6 tuners.
 
Well I will at some point definitely be running more than 3 extenders because I'm getting rid of all my cable boxes and right now I have 3 TVs that will likely grow to 6 at some point when I get to the upstairs of the house.
 
Ronstang said:
Well I will at some point definitely be running more than 3 extenders because I'm getting rid of all my cable boxes and right now I have 3 TVs that will likely grow to 6 at some point when I get to the upstairs of the house.
Click to expand...

Then you'd be better off getting the i5. Better to get more power than you need now when you know you'll need it in the future.
 
That was my thinking, spend an extra $100 now knowing my forever tinkering personality is going to mean I will just keep wanting the machine to do more.
 
The reason the extra CPU cores are needed for extenders is because you'll need the horsepower to transcode the streams that the extenders are looking for.

In terms of actually recording the streams, the CPU doesn't have to do much, just passing bytes from the card to the disks. You will need a decent storage array to handle pushing 6 HD streams to disk at the same time. You'll probably want to have a 4 drive RAID 5 array (drive size depends on how much overall capacity you're looking for).
 
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