How to get a nice Home Theater PC for $595
As I’ve previously explained, an Intel G45 motherboard and Intel Conroe-L “Celeron” processor makes the ideal computer system as oppose to an NVIDIA Ion system. Now I’ll give you the full configuration list of parts for building a great HTPC system for under $600.
Blu-ray and NAS storage capable Home Theater PC (HTPC)
| Item | Cost |
| Foxconn G45 MicroATX motherboard
ICH10R storage controller (RAID 0, 1, 10, 5) and Blu-ray capable HDMI graphics |
$92 |
| Intel “Celeron” 430 Conroe-L 1.8 GHz
Stock speed much faster than dual-core Atom, and can easily clock to 2.88 GHz |
$40 |
| 2 GB DDR2-800 RAM | $22 |
| Lite-on Blu-ray ROM drive | $90 |
| Western Digital Green 1.5 Terabyte Hard Drive | $140 |
| Thermaltake Xaser Mozart HTPC chassis (supports 5 internal hard drives) | $109 |
| Hauppauge 1196 WinTV HVR-1250 Hybrid Video Recorder PCI-Express 1x | $52 |
| Seasonic S12 330 watt 80 Plus power supply | $50 |
| Total | $595 |
At $595, this is an unheard of price for an awesome HTPC system that you can hook up to your HDTV television set via HDMI cable. Not only can you play Blu-ray movies, surf the web, and watch Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and every other website, you can also do some casual PC gaming on your living room TV. A good Blu-ray player without any recording and storage capacity will cost you this much money and Blu-ray players typically have very annoying one-minute startup times but this computer can sleep and wake in a few seconds for instant-on gratification. You can also add 4 more hard drives to this chassis and have this double as a super fast gigabit network attached storage (NAS) server and the RAID 5 controller in the motherboard makes fault tolerant storage feasible.
To make sure this is compatible with your HDTV set, you need an HDTV with HDMI inputs with either 1280×720, 1366×768, or 1920×1080 native resolution (preferably the latter which is usually called “Full HD 1080P”). A nice 42″ LCD 1080P HDTV these days can be had for under $1000. You don’t need to worry about sound because HDMI covers both video and audio so it’s nice and simple with only one cable and connector to worry about. Also make sure you don’t make the mistake of buying hundred dollar HDMI monster cables.
Lastly, if you’re going to buy an OEM copy of Windows Premium Edition, wait till fall for Windows 7 and it should be available for around $120. I would also suspect that vendors will soon be offering free Windows 7 coupons for those who purchase Windows Vista.
Update 5/17/2009 – Note that the Blu-ray optical drive comes with an OEM copy of PowerDVD. The OEM copy is limited to stereo audio which is fine if you’re plugging this HTPC directly into your HDTV which typically only supports stereo anyways. If you’re going to plug this into a 5.1 or 7.1 receiver, then you’re going to need to upgrade to the full retail version of PowerDVD.
Also note that this type of system will idle around 40 watts or less and peak at well under 90 watts. The 330 watt power supply makes it somewhat difficult to achieve very low power states because the power consumption is too low to be in the optimum range of this power supply which is one of the smaller PSUs you can find. But if you load in 4 more energy efficient hard drives, we might expect the idle power consumption to remain below 55 watts which is extremely reasonable for a 6 TB storage device (using RAID-5).
Ok, here’s a stupid question: How does one control the system? Mouse, graphics tablet, remote? Also, what’s the noise level?
Good questions nextbend.
I generally don’t hear any noticeable noise on any computer I build when it’s using a digital audio/video port such as HDMI. If you’re using analog ports (which I do not recommend), the motherboard port won’t have much noise but the one that plugs into the chassis which requires an additional cable that plugs in to the motherboard might pick up some noise depending on how noisy your components/motherboard is.
I generally use a 2.4 GHz keyboard/mouse combination I can get for $35. Logitech sells a 2.4 GHz Bluetooth mini KB/mouse for $150 which is a bit expensive. The Hauppauge card also comes with a remote control for controlling Media Center.
Put Ubuntu 9.04 on there with Boxee.tv or XBMC!!
By “noise” nextbend may have been asking about fan noise. How quiet is this system, with the CPU cooler, case (?) and PS fans?
Dude, totally awesome. I think Bea is going to love it. You da man!!
JD, most “HTPC” systems are designed to be low noise. The Conroe-L processor is a 35W TDP processor and it probably uses no more than 10 watts most of the time which is easy to cool. The stock heat sink on these processors are variable speed and put out fairly low noise.
That certainly is one option dietrich, thanks.
does this setup support dolby true hd or dts-hd over hdmi? that’s my one gripe abt my amd 780g based system and the reason I still play blu-ray movie on my ps-3.
You need to spend an extra $30 to get the full version of the BD playback software to support 5.1 audio. The free PowerDVD software you get with the optical drive only supports stereo playback.
The motherboard here has the Realtek ALC888-GR chipset for onboard audio and it supports 7.1.
How would you use / connect a this “Home TheaterPC” to a “Speaker System” such as “KEF KHT5005.2″ (5.1 speakers only)? Meaning the sound portion of the HDMI to the TV would not be used. Would a 5.1 receiver be needed or is there some other addition to this “Home TheaterPC” that can be used to power the speakers?
If you want external speakers and 5.1 or 7.1 sound, you would attach the HTPC to your 5.1 or 7.1 receiver with HDMI inputs. Then you connect the receiver to the HDTV with the HDMI cable. Of course, your receiver needs to have HDMI inputs and outputs which is quite common in modern receivers.
If you don’t have such a setup, you can plug the HDMI directly to the HDTV. If you only have an "old school" stereo receiver, you can take the 3.5 mm stereo out and plug it in to your stereo receiver.
An AMD based HTPC will smoke that intel one with ease.AMD has an astounding chipset with the 790GX and the upcoming 785G. Pair that with a triple core AMD processor and BINGO, you have a more capable HTPC than what George Ou is suggesting.Sometimes I wonder why George is so heavily biased to intel…
An AMD Tripple core does not have the kind of low power characteristic I’m looking for in an HTPC computer. I’m looking for something with very low power characteristics, but with decent performance. The AMD low power dual-core chips low enough idle power consumption, but their peak power is a little higher and their performance isn’t as good.
Kudos George, you are the man. Keep it up, your writing is very insightful.
By the way – did you build this system, and how many watts does it run at idle? George, do you know if the G41 or G45 chipsets are better for HTPCs, and does any motherboard in particular with the G4x chipset use less wattage than another? Thanks again.
By the way, Zotac Ion platform won’t wake from standby correctly unless you hit the lottery and get the newest hardware version. Feh!!
The NVIDIA 7050 chipset motherboards don’t wake either, and it’s always ticked me off.
@Edward Kan
Not this exact configuration, but I’ve built many systems like this using similar chipsets and CPUs. I can get idle power down to 38W input power from the wall socket (30W output power) using a low power 3.5″ Hard Drive and a very small and efficient PSU. A lot of people make the mistake of using an “efficient” PSU but they use 600W power supplies which are way too large to power 30 watts of components efficiently.
George: I am considering building this …
Anything that you would change since creating this HTPC?