Hi Swoon, Thanks for the

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August 14, 2011 at 6:18 pm #5249
JonDeutsch

    Hi Swoon,

    Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  Much appreciated.

    You make a compelling case for the SSD.  I think I will go that direction, especially if the guide pops up faster.  My guide delay today drives me nuts.  However, as mentioned above, I’m very concerned about reliability.  From the stats I could gather, Intel is one of the most reliable.  I’m not an Intel fanboy.  I’m a value fanboy. 🙂  But I do not want to substitute value for long-term reliability.   Esp. on a boot drive.  What a hassle to recover from a crashed boot drive!   Any thoughts on this?

    Now there are two well-informed people telling me that I can cool down and get an i3 and a lower watt PSU.  That’d be great.  Thanks for the model # recommendation.  I’m not  driven by SeaSonic as much as I’m driven by quietness and reliability.  So any other recommendations for PSUs would be appreciated.

    I am also frankly struggling with the chassis decision.  I’d prefer a lower-profile case that only accepts low-profile PCI/e cards.  However, I’m not entirely sure if my existing Aver780 ClearQAM PCI card is low profile or not, and I’m not sure if I want a high quality audio card in the future (like an Auzentech) would be low-profile or not.  I’m just not that in touch with the intricacies of these components, or how accurately they are labeled when it comes to low profile or not.  

    Why would I want to keep my Aver780?  Primarily because I want FM radio support. And it looks like the only way to keep FM radio support is to do it via one of these ATSC/ClearQAM cards.  Right?

    Thanks!

    [quote=swoon]

    Hi Jon,

    Your choice of motherboard is excellent (I have four of them myself). Especially since you use networking features to communicate with your WHS and potentially networking your InfiniTV, the importance of having a quality NIC like that in the DH67BL can’t be stressed enough. On the surface, it may appear that AMD is cheaper, but buy an add-in NIC and you’ve negated much of the price advantage not to mention lost an expansion slot and potentially limited your chassis choice.

    Do you really need the power of the i5-2500k in your HTPC? If you won’t be doing commercial skipping or other CPU-intense activity, then you don’t need that much CPU. An i3-2100 should be plenty without compromising performance.

    The SeaSonic supply is excellent, but you don’t need nearly that much wattage unless you’ll be using multiple higher-end gaming-caliber GPUs. It is also going to waste power for your config. Power supply efficiency drops dramatically when load is less than 20%. I recommend you look for something more in the 300 – 400W range. If you want to stick with SeaSonic, take a look at the S12II 380B. You’ll also save quite a bit.

    Intel is a fine choice for SSD. If you want to cut off $50 (or more), check out the 96GB Kingston V+100 SSD. For HTPC use especially, the performance increases of the more expensive SSDs are not going to be all that noticeable. This model often goes on sale (as you can see from our Hot Deals forum). I use this model for my HTPC with the i3-2100 and DH67BL and I am very happy with it. Boot times are MUCH faster than powering on a cable STB from the off state which measure into the minutes. It is true that SSD is a luxury. It helps with system responsiveness. There is a noticeable improvement when opening guide, accessing anything database related like a movie library, recorded TV history, schedule, etc. I won’t build another HTPC or desktop without one.

    The HDD should be fine. If you are doing commercial skip analysis, you should consider a 7200 RPM model.

    Unless you have some non-low-profile expansion cards, you may want to consider a low-profile chassis and also one that will allow internal IR.

    You didn’t mention DRAM. It is so cheap right now, you should buy 8GB and at minimum 4GB since you are using two extenders.

    [/quote]