New Build. Any suggestions?

You need to save the items to a wishlist, make the wishlist public, and then link it here. Shopping carts aren't public. You could also just C&P the items you have in your cart to here.

Hmmm, that's not working. Did you make your wishlist public? What did you name it?

Probably your best bet right now is to copy and paste the info here.

Oh well, it took a few hours just to get the wishlist posted so it is too late to comment...

Probably too late now but it seems like you could get a lot more for the same money... Also, a remote might be a good idea.

Before I will touch this with a 10-foot pole I think you need to explain the above a little better.

Any local media or all streamed from netflix/hulu?

Do you want 4 htpc's? or connect 1 htpc to 4 TV's?

You want to stream movies music netflix and hulu to your desktop also?

I have been lurking the forums for a few months gleaning lots of knowledge - but this is my first post - so take it for what it's worth. I thought I would chime in because I set-out to build a similar budget machine with similar requirements back in late October. My line of thinking getting into the build is that I acknowledge that I am a "tweaker" that is willing to crack open the machine now and then to improve the components on an as needed basis. I wanted to build the best machine that I could for under $500 initially.

As I have been lurking this forum, I am starting to wish that I would have looked harder at the Intel Ivy Bridge route. It still amazes me that I could have built a very low budget Celeron G540 based system to start that eventually turned it into an i7 workhorse as the price of the processors drop. I ended up going AMD with the primary driver being that I wanted the extra SATA III ports that the FM2 chipset offers. If you are thinking AMD as well, I would recommend that you look at the newer Trinity FM2 chipset vs. the Llano FM1 chipset. AMD has stated that they will be releasing at least one more processor for this architecture. As a result the components would be upgrade-able in the future.

Below is a link to the rig that I built. Overall, I am very happy with the performance to this point. (Missing my online the build list is a SiliconDust HDHomeRun HDHR3. I didn't add it because you didn't have a tuner card as part of your build).

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/x3cd

While my rig is only $50 more, it has 2x memory, 2x disk, and a CPU with a benchmark score of 4225 (vs 3352 for your build). More importantly, A8-5500 is a 65 W TDP processor vs 100 W in your build - which means less heat to deal with under load. If you have to keep your build under $400 (I understand budget constraints), you could swap out the 2 TB drive for the 1 TB and the 8 GB memory for 4 GB memory like you have done in your build. That would eliminate $55 from the build.

To be fair, since putting together my build, I have tweaked it a bit. I ended up removing the DVD drive and put in an Asus Blu-Ray Burner (New Egg Black Friday sale) and added an OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB SSD (TigerDirect Black Friday sale). The SSD isn't 100% necessary - but it did add a significant improvement in application speed browsing my libraries in WMC and XBMC. If you can spare the expense, the SSD was the best of the two improvements.

acfarrey posted a pretty good build for you.

I would make a couple suggestions though.

If you are not concerned with power I would get the a8-5600k 100w which is $5 cheaper right now and faster.

I like the case you picked out better(I believe it supported full-height expansion cards but he listed a slightly cheaper option.

You picked what should be a better power supply.



My last suggestion would be to look into an ssd. It doesn't need to be the fastest. Last gen or the generation before is perfectly fine. This will make your htpc seem much much faster. Using it only as an os drive is perfectly fine so a 40-60GB is fine.

What exactly would an SSD speed up in an HTPC? When you say using it only as an OS drive, do you mean ONLY Windows (or whatever OS) on it? Or do you also install say MB, MCM, MakeMKV, etc on it? Basically I'm wondering what an SSD would do for my system?

(I DO have an SSD in my gaming system, and I love it. I love the fast reboot/boot time, and I LOVE how fast my game loads when changing zones and such (World of Warcraft). I try to install most applications on my HDD instead of the SSD, though, so I am curous what kind of difference it would make in my HTPC...I think I have space for one, and have been thinking about cuz I am so spoiled with the nearly instant reboots on my main PC LOL)

The SSD is used to hold the OS and whatever applications you are running to rip and play your media. The actual media is stored on your spinning drive (local or network). In my case, I use WMC for recorded and live TV. I use XBMC for all other content (ripped DVDs, streaming, music, etc). Since cutting over to an SSD, I have seen a significant time improvement in the amount of time that it takes to switch back and forth between WMC and XBMC using my AutoHotKey script mapped to my remote buttons. Because I also left my "user data" on the SSD, XBMC is storing the skin images, fan art, and metadata on the SSD. The end result is a drastic improvement in the transition from background to brackground when navigating through my media in XBMC . Talk about serious eye candy.

In the end, do you need an SSD - absolutely not. I ran my system without one for about 2 months. The SSD changed the experience to the point that my wife has commented several times how slow our old DirecTV box was. And that is a good thing as this started out as my "hair brained idea" to cut the cord on DirecTV. :-)

I was initially going to go with the 5600 instead of the 5500. The choice to drop down to the 5500 was because I had to make a some "budget cuts" to get under my $500 limit. My initial build was using the Silverstone GD05B case which was around $100 at the time. Using that case I couldn't get the build under $500 without sacrificing on 2 TB disk. (I ended up at $520 with remote and tuner). I chose to drop down to the much smaller ML03B as a compromise to get below the budgeted amount. Moving to the smaller case, though, lead me worry about heat in the cramped quarters...so I went with the 65W TDP version of the processor. To me a case is a case...as long as it looks nice I am good. (I acknowledge that future expansion is limited). Heck - I might have built it in a cardboard box if it would have passed the wife-acceptance-factor. ;-)

As Acfarrey stated the SSD makes transitions and loading of the accompanying artwork load instantaneously. It really makes the experience that much better.