Background

As a home cinema enthusiast and casual player, I always fed the idea of having a high quality surround system on my living room. That opportunity presented itself when both me and my fiance decided to buy our first apartment about two years ago, so long before that I started envisioning and planning on the best possible configuration. When our building reached construction phase, my goal was to setup a 7.1 audio channel system. Issue is, unless you are a lucky enough to have a home-theater-friendly wife, you are in for tough resistance. So there were several things that had to be thought of in order to maximize the WAF indicator (Wife Acceptance Factor) at the time of discussing living room layout/design.

1. Cables. A 7.1 setup requires a lot of cabling…. Going everywhere. So cables had to be out of sight somehow, and an under-the-carpet solution wasn’t gonna stick (didn’t bothered to consider wireless, of course). So in order to accomplish this, I added internal wall and floor cable routing tubes. Also added one for the wall mounted flat screen TV, along with power outlet. So, check!
2. Lots of “huge” speakers – as she said. This was tough. It’s all in the eye… I thought if the speakers had the right coloring and design match with the surrounding environment, I should be safe. Indeed I was. Went for Monitor Audio RX1 black gloss finish surround speakers, piano white lacquer Radius HD R45 for back speakers, and black oak vinyl for center/left/right and sub-woofer. It all blended well with living room furniture and general design. Check!
3. Lastly, the looks. It’s 99% of a women’s concern on every purchase. So simple and stylish speakers were in order. Also check!

In the end, combined with our “cableless” 46″ Plasma TV, and an optionally hidden Onkyo SR875 AV Receiver, it made the perfect WAF score and ended up being a great setup for the occasion. And today she is becoming more and more of a home theater affectionate. We’ve been watching High Definition content via cable TV provider and PS3. The latter, used for bluray viewing and streaming from PC via DLNA.

However, streaming from a PC to the living room TV via PS3 isn’t a perfect solution. Even with a gigabit network at your disposal, fast forwarding or similar can be time consuming and even be prone to streaming errors. I’ve used PS3 Media Server for streaming, and from my experience, it still isn’t 100% reliable for its purpose, and other solutions aren’t as good. I often got corrupt file error, stream freeze, and even unbalanced data rate at some point.

In time, this motivated me to build a Home Theater PC that would fit my needs and, at the same time, integrate seamlessly in my living room.

Requirements

There are, however, a series of minimum requirements that I believe should be mandatory on a HTPC, for it to be worthy of the name:

1. High Definition. By today’s standards, a Home theater PC should be able to output current audio and video specifications, as reflected by the market today. That means it should output 1080p video resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels), also referred to as “Full HD” and support both TrueHD and Dolby DTS Master Audio HD audio formats. That is good to satisfy the “Home Theater” direct designation.
2. Consumption. Every watt counts, and a HTPC is likely to be turned on the whole day downloading or encoding content to set things up for you before viewing. So a energy efficient CPU and hard drive are required.
3. Size. This is a major requirement as I’ll want the HTPC to blend in in your living room, nicely stored in your living room furniture. If not to optimize your WAF indicator (Wife Acceptance Factor).
4. Storage. Given my past experience, and also network storage performance, I’m prioritizing a local storage solution. It should be relatively large in order to comfortably store video/music/photos but also good read/write ratio. Also, we’ll want accessible and fast USB ports to be able to read/write content external hard drives or USB pens, even memory cards if possible. All of this, of course, by today’s standards.
5. Speed. Needless to say that speed matters. Either when accessing data while browsing through your media library, or when recovering your PC in sleep mode… You’ll want things to be fast and responsive.
6. Software. No HTPC can survive the test of time without proper usability. I will need a software solution capable of browsing my media library comfortably, provide good information, have good visuals and automation capabilities for cover art, subtitles and file naming.

Taking these into consideration, we’ll start by determining and deciding on the most influential technology/hardware and go from there.

Technical Specifications

Form factor

Size matters for an HTPC. You’ll want to store it nice and comfortably alongside your other devices and minimize the visual impact on your living room, so we’ll need a minimal form factor that would minimize case size but at the same time allow for the minimum chipset features on motherboards this size. Mini-ITX is a 17 x 17cm low-power motherboard form factor and can often be passively cooled due to their low power consumption architecture, which makes them useful for Home Theater PC systems, where fan noise can detract from the cinema and generic audio listening experience. It also has provision for one expansion slot that we can use on a dedicated graphics card, audio card or TV tuner. So this form factor will save us space and also gain portability, while supporting all the good stuff available on larger mainstream motherboard chipsets.

Motherboard and CPU

To comply with the requirements, the motherboard should be able to support Sata 6Gb, USB3, HDMI 1.4a and low power consumption.

On the Intel side, the latest and greatest is the Core i series chipsets, that give way to the latest i series CPU’s code named Sandy Bridge, launched in February 2011, with a new socket, the LGA-1155. From the current Intel chipset ofering, I would consider the Intel 6 series chipsets, that offers 6Gb/s Bus bandwidth and are for Sandy Bridge mainstream desktop and business platforms. Three new chipsets stand out: the performance-focused P67, the integrated graphics-focused H67 and the entry-level H61.

One thing to keep in mind when picking a new motherboard is to make sure the new motherboard comes with the new B3 stepping. This is because the 6 Series Chipset code named “Cougar Point”, which powers the new P67 series Sandy Bridge processors, has a flaw that may impact SATA performance over time. Under heavy use, there may be a degradation in performance. While this issue happens on a VERY small percentage of boards, it was big enough of an issue for INTEL to spend a billion dollars and raise the bar for the industry in terms of taking care of the customer. Even though the problem might not even happen for years, if at all. However, Intel took quick measures to fix this with the new B3 stepping fix.

So given the specs, form factor availability and my local retailer catalog and stock, H67 would be a good option. It has a TDP of 6.1 W and Sata3. Besides, it’s the cheapest motherboard on this configuration available. The following table describes most of the current ITX H67 models’s characteristics:

Given the retail price on each model (not present in the table by the way), and by contrast with overall features and quality, the ASRock model stood out from the rest. The non HT version (no WiFi and Media Center controller) it’s sold for around 78€. Great value, since I won’t need the extras of the HT (Home Theater) version so this motherboard would fit the Intel solution.

Among the available CPU’s for this motherboard there are two that particularly stand out due to their performance/consumption ratio: the Core i3-2100T, with 2.5Ghz clock frequency per core, and the Core i3-2120T that boosts 2.6Ghz, both sharing a TDP (thermal design power) of only 35W, which is ideal for a HTPC. Tests confirm that on CPU burn it maxes out at 33W, 23W on GPU burn, and 9.7W on idle.

They feature two cores (more than enough for HTPC duties), have a 3Mb L3 cache, LGA 1155 socket and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 2000 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), so you don’t actually need a dedicated graphics card unless you’re intending to play heavy games. Even on that regard it performs pretty well: it supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.1 and have decent gaming performance, but not for current games.

For video, features full MPEG2, VC-1 and H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 (also called AVC – Advanced Video Coding) hardware acceleration and 650 to 1250Mhz  (Turbo) core render frequency. The new GPU enables HDMI 1.4a so Blu-ray 3D is supported.

Since only dual-core Core i3 and Core i5 processors have an integrated graphics core, it means that an Intel Mini-ITX system with a quad- or six-core processor inside can only be built using an external graphics accelerator, and that would also demand higher TDP consumption. So these are the ones to go for. We can see these CPU’s in stores for around 110€.

In terms of audio, Sandy Bridge CPUs when paired with an H67 PCH (Platform Controller Hub) allow bitstreaming of up to eight channels of lossless audio typically found on Blu-ray discs. Dolby Digital, TrueHD (up to 7.1), DTS, DTS-HD MA (up to 7.1) can all be bitstreamed over HDMI. Decoded audio can also be sent over HDMI. They will be immediately listed in the display properties page after MEI drivers are installed.

As for an AMD alternative, AMD Fusion is the name. It’s the designation of a new series of APU’s (CPU + GPU) by AMD with the latest being the “Llano” 32 nm processor family. From what I’ve seen, integrated GPU from AMD is far superior to Intel’s HD Graphics 3000. An integrated Radeon HD 6550D generally performs between a Radeon HD 6450 and 5570 depending on memory speed. Compared to, say, the Core i3-2105, you’re looking at a nearly 2x performance advantage on average.

On CPU performance, Intel is still superior albeit the high hopes I’ve seen in specialty websites. You can take a look at a sample review here for your own conclusions. The strong point of Llano is obviously the embedded GPU and combined with their A75 chipset features like native SATA-600 and USB 3.0 support. Next to that, the powerful software suite surrounding Llano definitely brings heaps of advantages to AMD opposed to the competition. But the lowest TPU for desktop Llano (codenamed Lynx by the way) is 65W, which

In terms of power consumption, the the Sabine platform, introduced on June 30 for the AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform, provided some nice 35W TDP alternatives, with A8-3500M (4 cores, 1,5Ghz) and A4-3300M (2 cores, 1,9Ghz) looking promising. Available chipsets are A60M and A70M (Hudson-M2, Hudson-M3). However, I’ve seen no motherboard offering as of yet, so I’ll be forced to analyze a power efficient alternative on AMD.

And that would have to go to the E-350 “Zacate” (40 nm) model, that has a 18W TDP, but it’s 1.6Ghz and shows around 25% of Intel 2100T performance. On the other hand, it has the advantage of reduced price on motherboard + CPU bundle, since A50M motherboards generally have integrated E-350 CPU.

So currently for AMD to directly compete with Intel alternative discussed previously, it would have to sacrifice computational power and stick with A50M chipset limitations like RAID support, but would gain in native USB3, DirectX11, higher GPU performance, lower TDP and final bundle cost. ASRock E350M1 is one of the lower priced motherboards, selling for around 90€.

Since gaming is not a prerequisite on a dedicated HTPC, Intel solution is the ideal at this point.

Storage

Storage solution can take several shapes, depending on budget. There are two main storage interfaces present in today’s available hard drives:

SATA II (revision 2.0) -  3 Gbit/s

Second generation SATA interfaces running at 3.0 Gbit/s are shipping in high volume as of 2010, and prevalent in all SATA disk drives and the majority of PC and server chipsets. With a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s). The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 3.0 Gbit/s is roughly double that of SATA revision 1.

Sata III (Revision 3.0) – 6Gbit/s

The 3.0 standard was released on May 27, 2009.It provides peak throughput of about 600 MB/s (Megabytes per second) including the protocol overhead (10b/8b coding with 8 bits to one byte). Solid-state drives have already saturated SATA 3 Gbit/s with 285/275 MB/s max read/write speed and 250 MB/s sustained with the Sandforce 1200 and 1500 controller. SandForce SSD controllers released in 2011 have 500 MB/s read/write rates.

By the way, SSD stands for solid state drive, and it’s a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive.

At the moment, Sata III is only present in SSD hard drives, and although they show great performance, it comes with a high price. If money is no impediment, a Sata III SSD solution would be best. There is one thing you should though… Reliability on SSD drives has been questioned, so my advice is to stay informed before committing.

Other option, for a lower budget, would be to have a smaller size SSD to hold O.S. and dominant apps, side-by-side with a traditional magnetic disk hard drive of higher capacity for your other apps and relevant data, although higher capacity SSD’s are even faster at the same SATA spec.

Finally, the most wallet friendly option, which is using magnetic storage. Typically, ITX cases support 2.5 inch drives, and these are available in 10k, 7200 and 5400 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute). Nowadays a 750Gb 2.5″ Sata II 7200 RPM drive goes for around 80Eur and are 5400 RPM-equivalent power consumption. From a performance stand point, the WD Scorpio Black 750Gb 7200rpm does provide great balance, and has power dissipation values of 1.75W while active, 0.8W idle and 0.4W in sleep mode.

Memory

The AsRock H67M ITX supports dual channel DDR3 1333/1066 non-ECC, un-buffered memory. In this regard a 4Gb low voltage solution is more than enough for HTPC tasks. One of the best price/quality/performance options out there is the 4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1333 CL9.

It features a 4GB high performance module for use in high AMD Phenom II or Intel Core i7, i5 and i3 Dual Channel systems, fast 1333MHz with 9-9-9-24 latency at 1.65v, it’s backed by Corsairs Lifetime Warranty and supports Intel XMP (Extreme Memory Profile). The XMS3 family is Corsair’s mainstream line of performance DDR3 memory and are available in Corsair’s XMS heat spreaders.

Case

For a Mini-ITX H67 6.1W paired with the Intel Core i3 35W CPU not much is needed in terms of PSU capacity so the most important aspects to consider are size, front panel connections, build quality and overall design. Lian Li has great aluminum cases with great finish that already support USB 3.0 front connectors. But for my spacing needs, its 12cm height is a bit too tall for the available cabinet space, and would also impact on portability.

The 9cm height Antec ISK 310-150 ITX case has an elegant front finish with a 150 watts Flex-ATX PSU to power the system. It features two frontal USB 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone connectors, and a has 2.5″ drive opening bay. Both this model and the 300 model would fit the requirements. This one simply has a more visually compatible design, so it will be my first choice. This case goes around for

Overall

So all things considered it all pointed out to stylish, highly performant and cost-effective setup:

I’ve build this exact machine two weeks ago. Ordered from an online retailer from Germany that presented a diverse catalog and good prices. Shipping costs aside, it costed exactly 365,82€, and after playing with it until now I must say its worth every euro. I’m yet to get exact values on power consumption on Idle, Sleep and Burning states (must get a Kill-A-Watt of some kind), but my early estimate dictates it will be around 20-22W idle, and maybe 5W in Sleep mode.

One thing I did when building the HTPC was disconnecting the power LED that lights the power button. I’ve came to the conclusion that its too bright in a dark environment, and since most of the times, the HTPC is in plane sight, the intense blue light disturbed correct viewing a little.

Next I’ll be posting about software I used to optimize and automate the setup. After all, all this is worthless if good software isn’t put into good use.

Quick tip for taking screenshots in iOS: on the screen you wish to take a print screen, just hold down the Home button and then press the power button. You will hear a snapshot sound.

If you now go to your photos, you will see the screenshot you just took. You can manipulate it like any other image. Enjoy!