My packed HTPC

[Remnants]

Bought the cheapest and smallest ITX case I could find, the cheapest 1155 board and cpu, and ram.

Result:

Intel G440 Single core 1.6Ghz

4GB 2x2 AMD Entertainment Edition 1600Mhz

MSI H61-E35

ASRock Sata 3 PCI-E card

500GB WD Blue, 160GB maxtor (only 3.5" drive), 250GB Toshiba, and 3 320GB Seagate drives.

Intel stock cooler, Akasa sound dampening.

In the photos it's actually the old way I had it, I now have all 5 laptop drives where the bluray drive went, and the 3.5" drive in the 3.5" bay.

Literally made this machine just for a place to put my extra drives and to run local MP servers off of.

Thoughts, etc?

[MartyniP]

Surely using a single 2TB (or larger) drive would be easier?

[Remnants]

Nope.

G440: €35

1155 ITX board: €30

4GB ram: €20

Case: €30

Decent 2TB drives here are €110. Better to use the surplus laptop drives that I have than to get another drive for little less than a new system.

[paddytokey]

Is that CPU any good for streaming flash videos? Does it stutter on HD-content?

[Remnants]

It does 720p, not 1080p.

It can play flash games and simple games like Limbo, Bit Trip, and even runs Portal. Which is kinda crazy. However, I'd recommend you get at least the dual core celeron, or better yet a pentium. Once I saw the bad 1080p performance I've left the machine as a server and nothing more.

[paddytokey]

Thank you, that's what I needed to hear. Flash-video streaming is pretty much the most important thing to me because I watch a lot of live-streams (sports and so on) and need a media-pc to handle this. Thought of getting an AMD APU for that purpose, but their CPU-performance is kinda weak...

[Remnants]

AMD APU's are perfect for online streaming.

Basically it comes down to these few points:

AMD APU for just streaming, and really, best off getting an i3 if you want futureproofed performance, better than pentium for sure.

[paddytokey]

Yeah I'm just thinking if in future I want to do some casual gaming (say plaiying FIFA with friends on my TV) I don't want to have trouble with the CPU performance. If I get an I3 I'm probably better off since I can always throw a graphics card in there if I need the horsepower, and if I should ever upgrade my PC I can use the 2500k I will have left over for the media-pc. It's just that, APU's are so cheap ... ^^