New HTPC build

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5teve

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
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Perth, Australia
Hi Guys

I'm pondering over building a new HTPC for Mediaportal (long time user and previous testing team member prior to moving to OZ) I currently have a 4gb athlon x2 running 2x raid0 arrays (1tb each 2x 500gb hitachi drives per array) Its running windows 7 nicely (surprisingly!) but i'm looking for something that will be a bit more energy efficient and can maybe even sleep and wakeup as required correctly.

Its been a while since I have done a htpc build, and things have really changed, very few tv tuners seem to be available now (i have 6 in the old unit) and its all about low power..

CPU & Motherboard
So i'm looking for ideas on low wattage CPU's - no preference for amd or intel and board with a few legacy PCI and PCIe slots if an Athlon X2 copes it wont have to be a blazing chip.. but I sometimes (rare) use the system for ripping and transcoding.

SSD
I'm looking at using a small ssd as a boot drive and maybe just use the gigabit network to the server to store all files, to save me running more hard disks in the system. I'm just wondering if an ssd would be useable as a timeshift drive also.. its going to get a lot of read writes, but longevity wise, i'm not sure it would cope, not that we watch a huge amount of TV (maybe an hour a day, but we record a lot too, which timeshifts and writes the .ts file - but this would be over the network potentially) Any options for a small enterprise ssd (sata) that could deal with this kind of scenario? Some users have used a ramdisk, but i dont fancy throwing more than about 8gb ram at this..

Thoughts would be appreciated!

Steve
 

maze

Active Member
Apr 27, 2013
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Have you considered something running off an avoton board? - That will give you quite a decent power/watt ratio.
 
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neo

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2015
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I've had various high powered HTPC across the years, and the most efficient setup I've transitioned to recently would be a Kodi Rasp Pi 2 as the front end. Networked to a NAS on the backend- in a spare room. For my tv tuner with this setup a HDHomeRun - network based works better then a PCIe based tuner. Tiny form factor, powered by a USB port, and surprisingly powerful.
 
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