Stephen Beattie

Following on from my last post, I’ve ditched the idea of building a new mini-htpc for the time being.   Nothing quite beats building a PC from scratch – it appeals to the Lego man in me – but using my existing Antec Fusion mATX media centre case and PSU saves me a considerable amount of money.  I’d love to build something small and sexy in the future but for now I just need a working system for as little outlay as possible.

I am still sticking with the AMD 780G platform, however.  The desktop (mATX) versions of these boards have recently dropped dramatically in price.  The energy efficient 45W CPUs have gone up slightly since my last post but overall a 780G system is getting cheaper.

Here’s what I’ve just bought for £125 at eBuyer:

• Motherboard: PowerColor RS780G
  - bumpytrails has a nice unboxing gallery of this board
  
• RAM: Kingston 2GB DDR2 800MHz CL5 1.8V
  - Single stick. I know they work better in pairs but I’m on a budget and want to expand later – the PowerColor only has 2 RAM slots!
• CPU: Athlon64X2 4850e 2.5Ghz @45W
  - Obviously not as power efficient as an Atom but should have no problem transcoding video on the fly.
• Extras: Plexus SATA TO IDE Dongle
  -  The PowerColor motherboard only has one IDE connection so to make use of my existing drive I need to use this adapter.  I’m waiting for SATA SSDs to come down in price so this is a temporary measure for the system drive.

I think this is £125 well spent.  When the bits arrive and I plug it all together I should be good for 1080p playback and reasonably quick video encoding.  This will be a huge step up from the 1.4GHz 512Mb RAM Athlon XP sytem currently squatting in my lounge.  It’s going to be more powerful than the Eeebox B208 system I’ve somehow convinced myself I NEED too (although I can’t fix this one to the back of a TV in quite the same way!) .

Software-wise, I’m going to install Windows 7 and try that version of Media Center out.  I’ve been looking for a decent media center application and previously tried MythTV (via Mythbuntu).  Ugh! – I never got it working and wasted days trying to get the RadioTimes TV listing feeds integrated.  Until Boxee has TV tuner support, I’ll stick with Redmond thanks.

Update: Apparently the groovy NOAH case only has an 80W PSU.  This is insufficient for the components specified.  However, this is such a nice case I might see if the on-board PSU can be upgraded.

With all the fuss over the recent Intel Atom processors I thought it time to look at what components I could use to build a smaller, more energy efficient machine than my honking huge lump that’s too big to fit under my TV.

I am currently running an old 1.4GHz Athlon XP 1600+ with 512Mb RAM which has been just fine for my needs with a regular CRT telly.  My graphics card is a (now ancient) nVidia FX 5200 with a decent S-Video out but incompatible with Vista and while I dearly love my Antec Fusion case it really is too huge to have kicking around my living room floor.

My first thought was whether I could use the cutesy Asus Eeebox for but reading up on it’s video playback performance I quickly realised that it’s no good for content with a resolution above 720p.  The Atom just doesn’t cut it.

How about two Atom processors then I thought?  The MSI Wind Desktop barebones kit looked much more  capable but the case was just plain ugly and there doesn’t seem to be anyone other than Newegg stocking these little boxes – no good for me as I’m UK based.

So I paid a trip to mini-itx.com and wasted an hour or so investigating my options.  I was pleasantly surprised to find it’s now possible to put together a spec for a mini-itx box that uses a standard desktop processor for a relatively affordable price.  AMD have radically improved the energy efficiency of their processors in the past year and good performance is finally attainable for little power consumption.

So, after a little research to find the best prices from other sites, here’s my current thinking:

List of Components

From mini-itx.com – £101.05 (incl. VAT)

• Silver Noah 3988 Mini-ITX Case £69.33
• Silverstone NT07-AM2 Low Profile Heatsink (space is limited in the Noah case) £22.33
• Delivery to UK Mainland  £9.40

From ebuyer.com – £114.20 (incl.VAT)

• Pioneer KD-08 Slimline DVDRW £26.37
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4850e @2.5GHz, 1MB Cache £39.77
• 2GB DDR2 800MHz SODIMM £24.03
• Free Delivery

From linintx.com – £104.58 (incl.VAT)

• Jetway JNC81-LF AM2+ AMD780G Mainboard £104.58
  
• Free Delivery

From my spares – £0.00 (incl. VAT)

• 80Gb Hitachi SATA 2 2.5″ laptop drive (small drive needed to use the PCI riser for a TV card in the Noah case)
• PCI Digital TV Tuner Card

So the grand total for my upgrades would be £319.83.  I’ll certainly be considering this….