Netflix integration in Windows Media Center 7
The HTPC, or Home Theater PC, has been an elusive beast. For years, people have bandied about the concept of building a PC that is a dedicated home entertainment hub rather than a general-purpose computer. Up until very recently, building an HTPC has been a difficult journey to find the sorcerous combination of parts and software that would enable exactly everything one wanted the PC to do.
Luckily, everything has recently started coming together. Retail availability of key technologies such as efficient power supplies, cool and quiet processors, HDMI-enabled and 1080p-capable GPUs, massive storage capacities, and–perhaps most importantly–an HTPC-optimal OS have all come together in a ballet of technology which can provide a seamless and graceful HTPC experience.
We have put together an amazingly high performance and relatively low cost HTPC just in time for the 2009 holiday season. While we did operate with a liberal cost philosophy when it came to component choices, we feel that this remains an affordable project for those in the market for a full-featured home entertainment hub.
We’ve had this system running at our office for a few weeks now, and we’ve been hard pressed to find a task that it cannot handle. Our HTPC has even proven somewhat capable with gaming; it could easily handle any game on the market if we added a good discrete GPU to it.
The core of the system is the Vision platform: The seamless union of an AMD processor, chipset, and GPU. AMD has really pushed the platform ideology lately, and it has become quite impressive for feature-built PCs such as this. To that end, we’re switching it up from last year’s Intel Core 2 setup to a system built around AMD components.
AMD’s 2006 acquisition of ATI is clearly beginning to bear fruit, as the ingredients of the Vision platform show a definite technological cooperation that is simply not possible with parts from disparate manufacturers.
All of our testing was done at 1080p (1920×1080) resolution on an HDMI-equipped Samsung HDTV and a Logitech THX-certified 2.1 sound system.
Motherboard
The foundation of our HTPC is the motherboard. We received a Gigabyte MA785GPMT-UD2H as a review sample and figured it to be a low-budget, low-feature micro-ATX socket AM3 board. We were wrong. It is indeed low budget, but it carries the AMD 785G chipset, uses high-endurance solid capacitors, and is made with 2oz of solid copper in the PCB; the board has a heft and solidness that we’ve never seen in a micro-ATX board.
The MA785GPMT-UD2H is the most full-featured budget motherboard we’ve ever had on our test bench. It supports up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and it has the amazing ATI Radeon 4200 IGP for video, which delivers HDMI, DVI and D-sub out connections.
This board also sports an 8-channel Realtek DSP with optical SPDIF output. Connectivity is rounded out with an eSATA port, 6x USB ports, a gigabit Ethernet controller, and a 1394 port. With this board in your HTPC, you only need three cables to hook everything up: A power cord, an Ethernet cord, and an HDMI cable.
PRICE: $94.99 from Newegg.
Processor
We chose the AMD Athlon II X4 620 as the brains of this little operation. It’s basically a Phenom II without L3 cache–something you really won’t notice in your home theater tasks. This little four core wonder (notably, the first quad core CPU for under $100) handily powered through all encoding and decoding tasks we threw at it.
At 95W TDP, the 620 represents the ideal balance between performance and economical power consumption. We briefly toyed with using one of the “e” series Athlon IIs for this project, but decided that the extra speed provided by the 620 was worth the additional 40 watts of TDP. Even at a “gluttonous” 95W, this machine will still dissipate less heat than, say, a Playstation 3 or an Xbox 360.
Also: we have it on good authority that this thing can be overclocked very easily, even on the stock cooler.
PRICE: $99.00 from Newegg.
Memory
We can’t lie: OCZ has been a great friend to Icrontic over the years, and we have no trouble recommending their memory for this project. It would be easy for us to say “no way, let’s jock some other memory company” if OCZ would just… Screw up for once. You know, release a shoddy product, make some overpriced piece of garbage, or have terrible support or crappy warranties. Unfortunately, they keep avoiding all of that and consistently produce excellent hardware at a compelling price. It’s very frustrating for us.
The only thing we don’t like about OCZ is their infernal insistence on sticking with mail-in rebates for their compellingly low prices. We’d rather see direct discounts, as MIRs are a pain in the ass for the consumer and manufacturer. OCZ, give it up!
At any rate, the 4GB OCZ Gold AMD Edition kit provides a solid amount of RAM for this box. Even when transcoding 1080p video while surfing the web and playing music, we never got above 2.4GB of RAM usage. Right now, 4GB is the definite price/performance sweet spot, and OCZ fits that bill.
PRICE: $83.99 from Newegg after a $20 MIR.
Graphics
This represents a major departure from the norm here. For the first time ever, we recommend sticking with onboard video for one of our builds. The ATI Radeon 4200 IGP is a marvel: A truly capable, DirectX 10.1-compliant GPU that just happens to be soldered onto a motherboard. We had our doubts, even as we fired up Team Fortress 2 at 1920×1080. Though, admittedly, all settings had to be cranked to low, but the game was perfectly playable.
The motherboard we chose provides 128mb of onboard DDR3 1333mhz RAM dedicated to the GPU. You can allocate more from your system RAM if you so choose, but for theater tasks, this is unnecessary.
Even more impressively, we’ve watched the Radeon 4200 IGP obliterate the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT in hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding. While it is certain that almost any modern discrete GPU will facepound the 4200 in gaming tasks, we’re not here to game–we’re here to do media, and the 4200 excels at this.
In addition, the 785G chipset supports Hybrid CrossFireX. Stick a low-end discrete Radeon HD card into the PCIe slot, and it’ll help with 3D rendering so you can improve your gaming. In all honesty, with the prices of the new 5000-series, we don’t see much use for this, but it’s there if you want it.
PRICE: Included in the motherboard
Power supply
The power supply is an oft-overlooked piece in an overall system build, and it absolutely shouldn’t be. It’s hard to feel romance towards the lowly PSU because it doesn’t make your computer run faster, make more polygons show up, or make your system look better. It’s an ugly square wart with a glob of cables dangling from it that we hide away behind computer panels. Still, choosing the PSU is one of the most critical decisions a system builder makes. A good PSU can last years, and can last you through several system upgrades. If your PSU fails, it can take expensive parts with it. It pays to pay attention and do your research.
Since we are focusing on silence and efficiency here, we’ve decided to recommend the OCZ Z650, a 650W, 80+ Silver certified PSU. OCZ has been building quality PSUs for years now, and the 80+ Silver certification ensures >88% efficiency. A thermally controlled 120mm fan means you won’t hear much out of it. It definitely has enough juice to run this box, even if you add several hard drives.
PRICE: $109.99 from Newegg.
Storage
There was a time when 7200 RPM hard drives made shrill whining sounds. They were hot, noisy, and unreliable. Those days are gone. Storage capacities are massive, drives are cheap, and constant improvements in engineering have made for incredible leaps in reliability and performance.
We wanted a drive large enough to store every piece of content we could imagine–all of our photos, music, and movies. Even small home videos filmed at 1080p can take up massive amounts of drive space. One can never have enough storage space.
We chose Western Digital’s 2TB AV-GP drive. The AV-GP is a purpose-built drive made specifically for power efficiency and multimedia streaming. It is ideal for our setup.
The AV-GP series stands for Audio/Video Green Power. At full read/write, the TDP on this drive is only 5.91W–about as much as your phone charger. With a 32MB cache, support for the ATA streaming command set (Western Digital brands it ‘Silkstream’), and IntelliSeek, the drive performs its job admirably, quietly, and efficiently.
The winning feature (besides the massive capacity) with the AV-GP is the ATA streaming command support. Of course, we won’t be streaming 12 simultaneous HD playback sessions at once, but the ATA streaming command makes the drive technically capable of it. What this means in practical terms is that our movie won’t stutter or be interrupted if Windows randomly decides to defrag itself or update your virus definitions.
PRICE: $291.17 from Amazon.
Operating system
There really is no question about it–Windows 7 is the ultimate HTPC OS. Besides support for all the latest hardware, and key technologies like hardware-accelerated H.264 encode/decode, Windows Media Center provides the perfect HTPC experience.
Windows Media Center does it all.
A plugin for Netflix is already available, and a Hulu plugin is coming soon. It would be pointless to go with anything less.
PRICE: $106.99 from Newegg.
Optical drive
While a Blu-ray drive is pretty much a necessity for a modern HTPC, it’s nice to have the ability to burn DVDs as well, even if only for backup purposes. We could have specified a Blu-ray burner here, but the price is still out of the realm of practicality. Therefore, we went with an LG BD-ROM drive; a good brand that provides BD-ROM reading at 8X but still gives us the ability to write DVDs. The interface is SATA, and it also has LightScribe support, if that interests you.
PRICE: $109.99 from Newegg.
Tuner card
A strong tuner is an important part of any HTPC if you are a television watcher. There is really only one name in PC tuners, and that is Hauppauge. For the release of Windows 7, they have a new 7-certified card that fits nicely into a PCIe slot, and it comes with a Media Center-compliant remote to boot. Support for two separate inputs, clearQAM tuning, as well as Media Center integration and 1080i recording provides full DVR functionality.
PRICE: $129.99 from Newegg.
Enclosure
It really doesn’t help to recommend an enclosure. There are so many varieties, styles, and shapes that recommending an enclosure makes no sense. Everyone building an HTPC has unique needs for the space, shape, and aesthetics of their entertainment center. We have, however, reviewed several enclosures this past year, so we can recommend some brands. We have been continually impressed by the quality and value of NZXT, Antec, and Silverstone enclosures. Between them, you are sure to be able to find the perfect enclosure for your situation.
Final thoughts
For just over $1000 we were able to spec out an extremely capable HTPC that can do multi-purpose work like light gaming, home file serving, or network backups. It can even be upgraded to handle enthusiast gaming. Even doing all of these things, the overall power draw is going to be relatively economical.
Everything is coming together. All of the parts are seamlessly tied together with the latest generation of OS and drivers. This is a great time to be an enthusiast, and building an awesome HTPC is an excellent project to help exercise those nerd muscles.
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