The guide!
How to build a media PC aka "Home Theater PC" (HTPC)
Obviously, you're gunna need a big screen, a TV, and some speakers. The hardware you have there, will dictate the hardware you'll need from your PC - so plan ahead.
Planning stage:
First things first: when making a HTPC, choose small, quiet components. it doesnt matter how good your case/accesory/doodad is that claims to be silent, if it has a single moving part... its not silent. Choose hardware that can run without fans, silent hard drives, and a quiet PSU from the start, and you wont need to spend another $100 later soundproofing your case.
by choosing a motherboard with the right hardware from the start, i wont need an extra sound card or video card - that saves me money when building it, AND saves power when using it (which indirectly, saves me more money). In my case, i also made sure the motherboard has E-sata, as theres where the movies i'll be watching are stored.
here is the rear of the motherboard i chose: for this system i will be using
HDMI for video,
optical SPDIF for audio, and
E-sata to connect my external hard drives. Because i have all neccesary connectors onboard, thats it for hardware purchases. I dont need any add-on cards to meet my goals.
Some of this stuff is common sense, but its all important when building a media PC.
Because my build is going to be silent, all the fans need to be slow, quiet and possibly temperature controlled. The concern here is that if you dont choose your parts properly, your new media PC could overheat. There are a few key things you can do, to help with this.
- Choose low power parts to start with. Check CPU Wattages, and power draw of video cards - lower is better, for media PC use. If it comes passive out of the box, its going to be a low heat model.
- Be careful with your wiring. If you only have one, or two fans - you cant afford for loose wires to get in the way, and block what little airflow you have
- Zip/Cable ties are your friends! tie those loose wires out of the way!
- Choose quality fans to begin with. My nexus fans are quiet at full speed, and silent when slowed down. Why buy high speed fans, if it takes a $30 fan controller to get them to an acceptable speed?
- Choose a high efficiency power supply, with a quiet fan. If you get an 80 plus certified PSU, that means its going to be more efficient - and that means colder. less heat means less problems.
- Positive airflow is better. That means more air in the case, than out. (dont forget to count your PSU fan here). The logic is that a positive airflow case, while not quite as well cooled will attract less dust - and your media PC is going to be sitting there, for hours and hours, collecting dust for months before you ever get to it. Keep it off the ground, and keep it clean.
Installation
At this point, i start installing the hardware.
Check this guide here by
Zekrahminator. He covers all the basics, i'm only going into media-PC specifics.
In my case, i already had a "sound proofed" nexus caterpillar case available, so i'm using that. Its a full sized ATX case, supposedly soundproofed and silent. Might as well use it for this guide, and my initial build.
The motherboard i'm using, is a Gigabyte mATX (micro ATX) board, with onboard video, audio, and networking. Why? Because its cheaper when i build the PC, and because it will save me power having just one piece of hardware doing all the work (instead of adding in dedicated cards to do the same job). The other advantage here, is that most media PC cases are 'half height' - that is, normal sized expansion cards dont fit! going all onboard, means i dont have to worry about parts not fitting when i replace the case.
First thing when installing a micro ATX (mATX) mobo into a full sized ATX case: lining up the screws! due to different sized motherboards using different hole locations, not all cases line up correctly out of the box. They use brass 'standoffs' which screw into the case, and then the motherboard screws into them. Motherboards do NOT screw directly into a case.
See the following pics, for example.
In this pic, you can see that the motherboard has 8 screw holes (highlighted in red circles)
In this picture of the nexus case, you can see four pre-installed standoffs in the right positions for this motherboard, and some holes where i'll need to attach the rest. Notice how sometimes they're very close to each other - its important to get the right ones, or you could have a standoff poking into the back of your motherboard, and short it out.
Of course, once its all in the case its ready to go. From here on will differ between systems, but theres a few tricks i've learned which can help people out, but have nowhere else to go in this guide.
- Get a cordless mouse and keyboard, and place the transmitter on top of your TV. it will have line of sight even if you place the keyboard on an arm rest or a coffee table, therefore having a better signal to use.
- Try and get a case with easy access front USB ports or get a USB docking ball on top of the PC, so people can plug in flash drives or external hard drives with ease. Might as well make it simple to get your movies/music on and off the PC.
- Bling is bad. You dont want roaring fans drowning out your music, and you dont want bright LED fans blinding you when trying to watch movies
- less is more. One hard drive is enough - make the rest external, or its only going to add to the noise, heat, and power consumption.
- Universal remotes can be used in combination with USB media center remotes. Simply "teach" your universal remote the commands your USB MCE remote uses, and you can do what i do and run your TV, speakers, and PC all from the one remote!
Software Setup
I'm going to write this guide using the software i use. It works, it doesnt conflict with other applications or programs. If you have any other codec packs installed on your PC (especially K-lite) - remove them before following this guide.
Software you will need:
1.
CCCP (aka combined community codec pack)
2.
AC3 filter
3. if its on a slower PC, you'll need
CoreAVC
CoreAVC is not free, but it definately speeds things up. On dual core machines, its not neccesary - so try with CCCP's inbuild codecs and only buy coreAVC if neccesary.
step 1. Installing CCCP
four pictures are included here - i have omitted steps for install directory and such, as they are unimportant.
1. Install with media player classic as the default player.
2. My suggested settings
3. Screenshot of settings for analogue speaker users (these will be changed later, for those with digital speaker setups like my logitech Z-5500's)
4. reccomended settings
Install AC3 filter now. its pretty basic.
Analogue users:
Pictures are not needed at this stage, so long as you listen to what i'm saying here. There is an option under "output format" to allow you to choose your speaker setup. If using analogue speakers, set this to match your speaker setup. If you're on digital, there should be a "no change" or "same as input" option - use that instead.
That setting can wreck true 5.1 files and drops them down to a "stereo x2" instead of true 5.1, so if you're having problems - try alternatives settings here.
Digital users:
tick the "use SPDIF" box on the "main" tab, and then setup your "SPDIF" tab like the following picture
This will pass through digital audio signals, without modifying them in any way. If you have a 5.1 file, you will get 5.1 sound - if you have a 2.0 file, you will get 2.0 sound. If your file is dolby digital you will get dolby digital, if its dolby DTS you will get DTS.
now for coreAVC (should you use the trial, or buy the program)
You can skip ahead until you get tickboxes for what components to install: untick "haali media splitter" - its already installed with the CCCP, so theres no need to have it twice. thats it.
Now, load media player classic.
Right click on the blank image in the middle of the window, and click options.
In the left hand pane, click 'output' under playback.
use these settings below:
Next click "external filters" and click "add filter"
click AC3filter and hit ok. On the right side of the window, click "prefer"
Repeat this for CoreAVC if you intend to use it.
click ok, close media player classic, and then open your media file... and you will now have the fastest software decoder for High definition files, as well as true 5.1 surround sound.
And the results?
You tell me... just how slow of a CPU can i pull this off with?
While the full movie may be a higher bitrate than this trailer, it does give you a pretty good indication that even 'older' hardware is more than capable of running HD movies in a media PC.
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Power testing!
Now that the system is complete, we'll go on and dispel a few myths about PSU's - some people tell you to get ridiculously high wattage, others tell you it literally 'wastes' power.
I have a power meter, so i did some tests with a few PSU's i had lying around.
Power test: antec basiq 550W PSU
System boot up: Highest reading was 92W, and that was while the vista logon screen appeared. Lowest was 50W. Average was around 65-70W.
Idling at the desktop with cool and quiet enabled, the system is using 46W of power.
Watching the aforementioned
HD trailer played steadily at 62-64W, depending on the complexity of the scene.
Maxing out the system with a combination of ATI tool and Orthos, the system peaked at 106 Watts of power used. At this maximum load, the PSU gave off a power factor efficiency reading of 91%.
Despite the fact this PSU was at one fifth of its rated output it had over 90% efficiency, and ran the system perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with using a 'too large' PSU to run even a low power system such as this one.
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Generic "Sun Pro" 550W PSU
This PSU came free with a case, and i know for a fact its pretty poor. Its got a 50W higher rating than the other one, but anyone with PSU knowledge out there already knows this generic, cheaply made unit is going to make a poor showing of itself.
System boot up: Highest reading was 94W, and that was while the vista logon screen appeared. matched up with the antec here, more or less
Idling at the desktop with cool and quiet enabled, the system is using 53W of power. almost 10% more than the antec.
Watching the aforementioned
HD trailer played steadily at 79-81W, upto 15W higher than the antec
Maxing out the system with a combination of ATI tool and Orthos, the system peaked at 118 Watts of power used. At this maximum load, the PSU gave off a power factor efficiency reading of 65%.
this PSU was rated 50W higher than the antec (which sounds like it should be 10% better, to a beginner) but in the end, it was around 10% *worse* - it was less efficient, and that showed up in the power consumption.
Summary:
Buy a real PSU - it doesnt just save you the risk of a PSU dying and killing your hardware - this example here uses about 10% less power, so thats 10% less electricity cost every year. THAT will save you money, as media centers are nearly always left on for hours and hours a day.
Note: just because there was a 10% difference in wattage, and roughly a 10% decrease in efficiency at the tested wattages, doesnt lend any credence to higher wattage PSU's "wasting" power. The higher the consumption got, the further and further these PSU's spread apart - if this was a 200-250W system, that generic would be wasting 50 watts or more of power, making the % difference even greater.
Modifying cool and quiet to save even more power with RMclock.
This *only* works on AMD CPU's and in most cases, ONLY if motherboard settings are left on auto - if you change your voltages in the BIOS, they aint gunna change in RMclock.
While this process is fairly simple, the program has a somewhat confusing layout. I'll be providing pictures, and a step by step process to show how its done.
1. Default settings
This is RMclocks default settings - notice how the voltages are all rather high.
Here, we disable everything except the multiplier we wish to test (5x) at the voltage we wish to test (1.250v, in this example - which is too high, as AMD CPU's are guaranteed to run at 1.10V at 1GHz)
Now we use the maximum performance profile (this one doesnt auto-adjust) and test it out. Locking it to this setting will allow us to test this specific multiplier on this specific voltage - it ensures its completely stable.
Next we turn the profile on - at this point, if your system freezes or locks up, it means your voltage was too low and the system crashed.
Next, we fire up a few programs.
- CPU-Z to make sure the Multiplier and voltage are correct, and actually changed.
- Coretemp to check temperatures. On my system, they're very innacurate - it claims 12 degrees, when its over 25C in my room.
Now, you let it test - if it lasts a few hours, consider dropping it another notch. The goal here is to find the lowest voltage that multiplier will run at - that makes it uses less power, and therefore saving you more money (and making the PC cooler/quieter too)
Once you've done this for the 5x multi, work your way up, one by one, testing each individual voltage out.
Once you've done that, repeat this process for each individual multiplier. it *will* take you a few hours/days, so be prepared to spend some time on this.
Once you've got them all narrowed in, it will look something like this
Next, go to "performance on demand" and tick all the boxes to enable those multipliers in this profile
Finally, set the program to start that profile whenever the program is started (using the startup dropdown, instead of 'current'). I prefer to set this up, and then leave a shortcut to RMclock in my windows startup folder, so that if it ever goes bad, i can simply boot into safe mode and delete the shortcut.
Thats it!
End results
average FPS is shown in the player to prove it wasnt stuttering or performing badly.
Tray icon for RMclock shows i'm running at 1000MHz (or 1GHz) at 0.85v ( as opposed to 1.10V with AMD cool and quiet)
at this setting, plaback consumed an all-devouring 46W of power
mission accomplished.
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