I Built A New Home Theatre PC This Weekend
One of the reasons I’ve been so quiet over the weekend is I’ve been building a Home Theatre PC, which when finished will totally solve my HD video issues.
It’s just about finished (read about my problems below) and it looks very cool in the Antec Fusion case pictured, although I’ve decided I need to buy a Graphics Card rather than rely on the onboard card in my ASUS M2NPV-VM Motherboard.
I wasn’t planning on building a HTPC and in fact I’d been trying to avoid doing so, but on Thursday my Netgear NEXT router died so I went shopping on Friday to buy a replacement. While I was looking around YoYo Tech on Tottenham Court Road, I starting looking at the HTPC cases and I told the sales assistant about the problems I was having getting HD video onto my HD plasma as my PC was in a different room and my Xbox running XBMC didn’t have enough processing power to handle 720p/1080i content.
I asked how much it would cost to put together a HTPC and he put together the following system for under £350 (funnily enough he put together this exact system reviewed by ExtremeTech):
- Antec Fusion Lifestyle Case
- Asus M2NPV-VM Motherboard
- 4600+ X2 Dual Core CPU
- 2GB DDR2 RAM
I cannibalised bits from my current PC (DFI Lanparty SLI-DR Expert, AMD 4200+ X2, 4GB Ram, 2xSamsung 19″, Seasonic PSU, Watercooled CPU & GPU , X1900XT, Soundblaster X-Fi, 1.7TB Storage) for the optical drive, TV card (Hauppauge Nova T-500) and storage (500GB SATAII)
Constructing the PC took longer than I hoped as cramming all the bits into the tiny case was quite hard work, but luckily my new HTPC booted at the second attempt. However, that’s when my problems started.
I decided that given that the HTPC would be my main music source it needed the Soundblaster X-Fi card but I couldn’t get the drivers to work. I managed to get the Hauppauge Nova T-500 card working which was good, but the video playback was very choppy and the colours were very poor. Upgrading the video drivers helped a bit, but the quality was still poor and definitely worse than my Xbox running XBMC.
I went for the Asus M2NPV-VM Motherboard as it has a HDTV out module with component outputs which meant I could I could use the Component inputs on my Panasonic SA-XR55 freed up by removing the Xbox, and because the store assistant told me the Asus was powerful enough to run HD video ( he probably read the ExtremeTech review). Unfortunately it’s not, so I started shopping for a dedicated video card.
I ended up buying a 7950GT graphics card, which is probably more powerful than I need but I’m trying to build the HTPC to last at least 4 years. Computer components change so quickly and technologies seem to become obsolete within 18 months, so I decided I needed to overspec the HTPC now as trying to upgrade it cheaply in the future probably won’t be possible.
Because the 7950GT comes with DVI outputs, I decided I couldn’t hold off buying a HDMI Switch any longer as my receiver only has 1 HDMI input and I knew that constantly having to manually swap 3 HDMI cables (Telewest TV Drive, PS3 and now the HTPC) was going to get annoying. It also meant that I had to splash out on a DVI-HDMI cable, a HDMI-HDMI cable.
All of this extra cost (including buying a cheap Soundblaster X-Fi card to replace the one I took out of my main PC, and a digital coaxial cable on eBay) meant that my HTPC hasn’t turned out to be the bargain I thought I had on Friday. When it is all finished though, I will hopefully have a stonking home network and entertainment setup that will keep me going for a few years until I decide to do something silly like buy a 1080p HDTV or decide I want to hook up the other rooms in my pad. That won’t be happening soon though as I should be buying a new pad later on this year, which will eat up every penny I have.
What PC/AV projects are you planning for this year?
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Comment by Zath on 21 September 2007:
Oh and I’ll tell you what my upgrade to Vista did to my HTPC - it killed my 9200pro passively cooled graphics card within days!
So have slotted in an old 9800pro card for now which gave it a nice boost in performance and so far so good!
Comment by Zath on 21 September 2007:
Yeah I’m using the new Media Center in Vista - I used to mostly use VLC Player, but have now installed the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, it’s now played everything I’ve thrown at it. Have you got a comprehensive codec pack like this installed?
I’ve not tried playing AAC files as I try to keep all my music in MP3 format, so if I move away from my iPod, I’m not creating problems down the line for myself.
Comment by Everton on 21 September 2007:
I spent hours on the phone with Creative and no joy. I managed to get the cheaper X-Fi Audio card working though, but it doesn’t have as good digital support.
Creative agreed to exchange my XtremeMusic card, but the replacement didn’t work either! I’m literally this second doing a full rebuild of the machine which might help - for some reason my mCE library was all messed up.
Few q’s:
- what do you use to watch videos? MCE?
- Have you worked out how to play AAC files in MCE? I’ve managed to get it working on my main machine, but not on the HTPC for some strange reason (another reason for the rebuild)
Comment by Zath on 21 September 2007:
Did you get your sound issues sorted in the end Everton?
How’s your HTPC working out now?
I’ve recently upgraded my existing HTPC set up to Vista, but am looking down the line to upgrade the system to a Core Duo chip and faster network (to help stream that hi def content!)
Comment by Everton on 20 May 2007:
I solved the IR problem by moving the reciever away from other wireless gear. I still haven’t solved my sound issue, so I haven’t had a chance to use the HTPC yet. I’m getting a I/O module from Creative in the post hopefully tomorrow, which will hopefully work with my amp
Comment by Zath on 20 May 2007:
Doh, just found an email reminder with a link to reply to your comment, anyway, I’d definitely look at the infra-red keyboards if you’re still having wireless issues?
I’ve got a fairly old, but quiet ATI 9200 graphics card which seems to do the job for now, although I’ve noticed the 720p stuff is fine if you run through from the start, however if you move to different points, it takes ages to figure out where it is, if at all! However general windows looks great on my Samsung LCD TV.
Pingback by Team Executor Confirm Leaked HACKED Xbox 360 Pics | Connected Internet on 11 May 2007:
[...] There are no details of what Team Executor did to actually hack the Xbox 360, what kind of chip was involved or, more importantly, whether mere mortals like myself will be able to modify their Xbox 360s without frying them. I’m beginning to worry now that I should have kept the faith for a bit longer and not splashed out and built a HTPC. [...]
Pingback by How Many Feeds Do You Read? Here Are My Top 10 Feeds | Connected Internet on 17 April 2007:
[...] a chance to clear out my feeds in Google Reader, due to going out a lot, my router dying and also building a HTPC over the [...]
Comment by Everton on 15 April 2007:
that’s one problem I forgot to mention - the keyboard. I bought a cheap £20 Logitech mouse and keyboard and I can’t work out if the range is awful, or if the Logitech Harmony remote, or my Wireless router is creating interference. It was so hard trying to change any settings as the stupid mouse and keyboard wouldn’t respond.
Do you have a dedicated graphics card to do the HD video? Does it handle 720p/1080i ok? What does Windows look like? My fonts were so blurry I could hardly read them.
I really hope the new card allows the HTPC to meet my expectations otherwise I’ve made a very expensive mistake.
Comment by Zath on 15 April 2007:
Sounds like you’ve had a bit of a struggle with it, but I’m sure it will be more than worth it, my HTPC is just an old P4 Shuttle I had no other use for, but it does a good job of playing video onto my HDTV for the time being.
I’ll probably leave it till next year to properly invest in a HTPC since I really want to upgrade my desktop machine in the next few months and move to Vista.
I did however buy one of those Microsoft MCE Infrared Keyboards - once you get used to the mouse pointer device, it’s quite useful having keyboard and mouse in one device.