Small / silent pc in a mini atx cabinet

[square_wave]

Hi all,

Thinking of making a small pc in a mini atx cabinet for two purposes.

1. Storing and playing movie files via hdmi
2. Ripping cds to flac

I have couple of requirements.

1. Silent operation ( not super silent but reasonably silent)
2. Small foot print mini atx cabinet
3. Cost should be commensurate with the performance required. Ripping of audio cds and playback of hd quality movies over hdmi. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I have narrowed down to the cabinet and 2 tb HDD.

What kind of power supplies, sound card and graphic card do you all recommend?

 

[krishpiscean]

There are very few options at medium budget for mini ATX but with micro there are plenty.

With latest AMD APUs, there is no need to get GPU

- AMD A6 5400k or A8 if 3D is required
- Any FM2 75 or 85 would be enough to decode all sounds, no need of sound card unless you this as a source
- Antec 350 with inbuilt PSU will do
- 4GB RAM
- Check if SSD is a needed

 

[square_wave]

@krish,

I will need hdmi out for movies. Do inbuilt cards provide this ?

What about this one for cabinet? Can I incorporate a remote control for these ?

Buy Online Antec ISK310-150 AP Mini ITX Cabinet in India

The 350 seems to be out of stock everywhere. Anything at this price range which looks and functions as good ?

 

[reignofchaos]

^^I have the above cabinet for my HTPC. It has one one major issue - it only takes laptop drives. Also because it is a low profile case, it'll only take single slot low profile external GPUs.

You can put a media center remote in any pc. However there's one catch - very very few motherboards allow you to turn your pc on with a remote. To do that, you need an IR port on your board to which you have to connect an IR receiver. USB receivers will not be able to turn the machine on. So far I've been unsuccessful in turning my machine on with a remote.

Almost all modern boards these days have HDMI connectors. Get a board that has HDMI. I'm biased towards a discrete GPU but onboard should also work these days.

As for the case - i'm running pretty potent hardware inside (i3 2100, SSD, Radeon 6570) and the thermals are never a problem nor is the inbuilt 150W power supply.

 

[krishpiscean]

@krish,

I will need hdmi out for movies. Do inbuilt cards provide this ?

What about this one for cabinet? Can I incorporate a remote control for these ?

Buy Online Antec ISK310-150 AP Mini ITX Cabinet in India

The 350 seems to be out of stock everywhere. Anything at this price range which looks and functions as good ?

All latest mobos have HDMI, so no need to take GPU just for that cause. For cabinet at 5900 range there is one more antec with 350w built in psu. It fits well in the living room for htpc. For remote it is good to go with internal IR as FM advised. If you take a mobo with built in IR, it will be very expensive and not recommended.

I feel it is good to go with this below config as a future proof for atleast 2-3 years.

- AMD A8 or A10 - (it can do little gaming and crossfire with supported mobo)
- 75 or 85
- 4GB RAM to start with
- SSD since ur looking for remote mean u need faster bootup
-no GPU for movies (add if u need games at medium to high settings)

 

[asliarun]

Amd is very good value for money but also consumes a lot more power than Intel's haswell range. A10 for example is 100w whereas haswell is available in 35w. Plus inbuilt hd4400 and 4600 is more than adequate for htpc and even light gaming. Only problem is higher price.

You can look at haswell NUC. It is super compact.

A good site for fanless cabs is

FanlessTech

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

A10 for example is 100w whereas haswell is available in 35w.

Wow, that must make a huge difference in heat production?

 

[sam9s]

I would alway recommend a dedicated GPU if any of the 3 requirement is your objective ..

1. 3D Movies playback specially Frame Sequential ISOs. Heck infact for SBS as well I would recommend a dedicated GPU to be on the safer side. Personal experience

2. Gaming even at a moderate res of 720p and all setting to mid with AA on. Dedicated GPU is a highly recommended

3. Rendering any sort, animation, heavy photoshopping ....etc

Apart from this, rest suggestions are pretty good.

One more thing to make a super silent PC not only the fans but the complete case has to be of top quality. Antec cases are really good but with mini atx the problem as reignofchaos mentioned it takes only laptop drive, plus there is dearth of space so you are limited in terms of adding external GPU or any other expansion card you might want to add later, so keep that in mind and make your decission .....

 

[musicbee]

I would alway recommend a dedicated GPU if any of the 3 requirement is your objective ..

1. 3D Movies playback specially Frame Sequential ISOs. Heck infact for SBS as well I would recommend a dedicated GPU to be on the safer side. Personal experience

2. Gaming even at a moderate res of 720p and all setting to mid with AA on. Dedicated GPU is a highly recommended

3. Rendering any sort, animation, heavy photoshopping ....etc

+1.

I have 2 systems with onboard HDMI but had to get a GPU for 1080P playback... I did find some lag (not always) in heavy action scenes. My system is not a slouch (i7 2nd gen, 16 GB RAM, SSD) but the GPU on the MOBO was always playing catch up. Also, a dedicated GPU if you do any sort of multitasking like ripping, encoding/recoding, downloading, etc. On paper the MOBO may have all the specs but personal experience has taught me for HD video a GPU is better... especially if you are looking at large 1080 rips and 3D content.

 

[asliarun]

+1.

I have 2 systems with onboard HDMI but had to get a GPU for 1080P playback... I did find some lag (not always) in heavy action scenes. My system is not a slouch (i7 2nd gen, 16 GB RAM, SSD) but the GPU on the MOBO was always playing catch up. Also, a dedicated GPU if you do any sort of multitasking like ripping, encoding/recoding, downloading, etc. On paper the MOBO may have all the specs but personal experience has taught me for HD video a GPU is better... especially if you are looking at large 1080 rips and 3D content.

Exactly which CPU or GPU do you have? One crucial thing to note is that integrated graphics capabilities have been doubling almost every year, for both amd and Intel.

One correction as well - the mobo doesn't have a GPU, it is the CPU that has the integrated GPU.

Please see this review for example. A 35 watt haswell easily does 1080p and also does 4k in some cases. The top of the line haswell for example performs has similar graphics performance as a nvidia 640gt.

Not saying this is the best option, but please do recognize that integrated graphics have improved leaps and bounds, and discrete graphics cards are power hogs that consume upwards of 150 watts. They are still very cost effective but if you are looking for a cool running compact htpc, you would be remiss in ignoring the haswell option.

I am beginning to sound like a fanboy but I have been a long follower of tech, and haswell's performance to power consumption is really ridiculous. It even has integrated the analog voltage regulator in the chip itself so the 35 watts actually includes the 5 watts that the mobo vr chips used to take. Consider the fact that apple upgraded the macbook air with haswell and nothing else, and battery life has gone up by almost double. It now lasts an entire work day, which is like tablet level of battery life.

AnandTech | Intel's Haswell - An HTPC Perspective: Media Playback, 4K and QuickSync Evaluated

 

[mowgli80]

@square_wave - For HTPC, all you need is a decent GPU. High quality HD movies require hardware acceleration provided by GPUs. CPU type does not matter. I have a Zotac ID-11 with Intel Atom CPU and Nvidia ION2 integrated GPU which comfortably plays all HD movies including the infamous "killa sampla" without breaking a sweat, something which even an i7 will struggle to play by itself. From my experience, I would stay away from ATI as their drivers are horrible. Nvidia is extremely stable and preferred (and my only) choice. For silent PC, I always recommend going the NAS way. High capacity HDDs being mechanical rotating devices are noisy and generate lot of heat and you need fans to disperse the heat which add their own noise. A NAS takes all these out of the equation and allows you to use a very small factor, fanless and dead silent HTPC your living room.

@reignofchaos - I have Microsoft media center remote and it wakes up my HTPC with a remote. Have tried with with two other systems (7yo laptop and 5yo NAS) and they all worked. The key is to have the USB port powered on and supply power to IR receiver and keep it operational even when the system is off. You can enable USB wake up from BIOS to wake from complete power off. Waking up from sleep is far easier as OS (Windows/Linux) gives better control over state of USB port.

 

[reignofchaos]

From my experience, I would stay away from ATI as their drivers are horrible. Nvidia is extremely stable and preferred (and my only) choice.

This is pure FUD. Been running AMD/ATI cards in 3 machines since the last couple of years and nvidia chip in one laptop. The most issues of late I've had is with the nvidia chip - broken deinterlacing, crashes to the desktop with madvr et al. Also there were recent reports of the 320.xx drivers killing Geforce 4xx/5xx graphics cards. Now that is definitely a first.

Used to be a big nvidia fan before but of late, all their steps have been anti consumer/enthusiast. First artificially throttling OpenGL performance to make people switch to uber expensive quadros, second not opening up the source for their drivers in linux - try comparing the open source radeon driver to the nouveau driver - the former will absolutely trash the latter, third and most recently - artificially throttling dual precision fp64 shader performance to 1:24 in the 780 GTX even when the chip is capable of doing 1:3.

 

[musicbee]

Exactly which CPU or GPU do you have? One crucial thing to note is that integrated graphics capabilities have been doubling almost every year, for both amd and Intel.

One correction as well - the mobo doesn't have a GPU, it is the CPU that has the integrated GPU.

Please see this review for example. A 35 watt haswell easily does 1080p and also does 4k in some cases. The top of the line haswell for example performs has similar graphics performance as a nvidia 640gt.

Not saying this is the best option, but please do recognize that integrated graphics have improved leaps and bounds, and discrete graphics cards are power hogs that consume upwards of 150 watts. They are still very cost effective but if you are looking for a cool running compact htpc, you would be remiss in ignoring the haswell option.

I am beginning to sound like a fanboy but I have been a long follower of tech, and haswell's performance to power consumption is really ridiculous. It even has integrated the analog voltage regulator in the chip itself so the 35 watts actually includes the 5 watts that the mobo vr chips used to take. Consider the fact that apple upgraded the macbook air with haswell and nothing else, and battery life has gone up by almost double. It now lasts an entire work day, which is like tablet level of battery life.

AnandTech | Intel's Haswell - An HTPC Perspective: Media Playback, 4K and QuickSync Evaluated

Like I said i7 2nd gen (Sandy Bridge). Now while I agree "integrated graphics capabilities have been doubling almost every year, for both amd and Intel" newer technology always does not mean better... case in point I also have an Ivy Bridge (running 22 nm) which actually runs hotter and requires more resources in terms of fans to run the machine/keep it cool.

I don't have a rig on Haswell so I will reserve judgement on it (for now).

Finally, you may be right (in this case) but integrated is not always right... be that people would be happy with onboard sound and not spend 5K to 10K on soundcards for their HTPCs and Media PCs. Similarly a GPU from the likes of NVIDIA does offer its own advantages.

 

[sam9s]

Exactly which CPU or GPU do you have? One crucial thing to note is that integrated graphics capabilities have been doubling almost every year, for both amd and Intel.

One correction as well - the mobo doesn't have a GPU, it is the CPU that has the integrated GPU.

Please see this review for example. A 35 watt haswell easily does 1080p and also does 4k in some cases. The top of the line haswell for example performs has similar graphics performance as a nvidia 640gt.

Not saying this is the best option, but please do recognize that integrated graphics have improved leaps and bounds, and discrete graphics cards are power hogs that consume upwards of 150 watts. They are still very cost effective but if you are looking for a cool running compact htpc, you would be remiss in ignoring the haswell option.

I am beginning to sound like a fanboy but I have been a long follower of tech, and haswell's performance to power consumption is really ridiculous. It even has integrated the analog voltage regulator in the chip itself so the 35 watts actually includes the 5 watts that the mobo vr chips used to take. Consider the fact that apple upgraded the macbook air with haswell and nothing else, and battery life has gone up by almost double. It now lasts an entire work day, which is like tablet level of battery life.

AnandTech | Intel's Haswell - An HTPC Perspective: Media Playback, 4K and QuickSync Evaluated

Its not just the resolution specs or the power consumption which should br the deciding factor, its the way integrated GPUs work, like shared memory, hardware acceleration etc) .... I have i7 2600K with HD3000 integrated GPU which is supposed to easily play 1080p content, infact 3D as well. But when I put it to test and stress, though it was able to play 1080p but lagged when I did some heavy multitasking along with the playback. With 3D it was even worse, I could not play Frame Sequential 3D ISO, sorry too much for HD3000, but SBS played fine only to crash the display drivers now and then, this problem was more with Intel Boards and less with ASUS, none the less it was there. Also this is not an isolated case I am talking about, the same result was when I performed the same testing with my friends PC with same HD 3000 integrated GPU.

I since bought GT440 and never looked back, its ROCK solid in any ANY kind of movie playback, with any kind of multitasking including the ever popular "killa sampla" video which mowgli80 always brings in to the picture ...

I have not used haswell per se, (I will when I feel my i7 getting older) but what ever be the case it can never match the performance of a dedicated GPU when it comes to 3D ISO FS playback or Heavy gaming and rendering (I can seriously vouch for Gaming and rendering, these two are pretty heavy GPU intensive tasks and Haswel or no haswell, can not even come close to the performance of a even a mid level dedicated GPU)

I would never take the risk IF my prime objective is one of the tasks I listed above, just for saving few watts or cost ......

as all say just my two cents ......

 

[mowgli80]

This is pure FUD.

As i said, the opinion was based on my experience. It is well known that Nvidia has far better drivers and their VDPAU hardware acceleration APIs are the best supported acceleration APIs on Linux, which I use. So no FUD, only facts there .

The most issues ... a first

Tough luck . I am using latest ubuntu, which has pretty latest nvidia drivers along with XBMC from git. No problems there in my HTPC for past three years . Regarding the dead chips, from what I remember, the problem was with a BETA driver, which they promptly fixed in the next beta. One should not really be using beta software. If you put steaming hot food in your mouth, you can't really complain about your mouth burning .

. First artificially ... quadros

OpenGL is relevant for gaming but not so much for HTPC. I don't think gaming is a requirement for square_wave.

second not ... noveau

I have been using open source software exclusively for more than a decade and would really like Nvidia to open source their drivers/specs. However, keeping ideology aside, practically, I would prefer a working closed source driver over multiple shitty drivers like ATI for my day to day use. Last I tried, neither fglrx nor radeon drivers were capable of providing proper reliable hardware acceleration on Linux which is a must for a modern HTPC. Infact, Nvidia were the first to support HW accel in Linux and it took another 2-3 years for ATI to open their HW accel unit.

third ... 1:3

Although I did not understand everything you said, from my knowledge, shader performance and precision is important for gaming and number crunching but not so much for HTPC. Sometimes, its cheaper to manufacture same hardware for all cards and enable/disable features through software/drivers and give higher precision/performace for the more expensive product. I don't see anything wrong with that. Even Microsoft does it with their Windows Home and Professional editions. As long as Nvidia did not advertise 1:24, I don't see a reason to complain.

I am not saying Nvidia > AMD/ATI in all scenarios. But for HTPC, I think its the best, based on my experience.

ever popular "killa sampla" video which mowgli80 always brings in to the picture ...

It is a superb benchmark sample .... isn't it. Infact, for normal i.e. non 3D HD decoding, the beginning of "Planet Earth", from where "killa sampla" originates, is one of the best benchmark for HD decoding. If your hardware and driver are capable of decoding it, you are in for long term satisfaction .

 

[sam9s]

It is a superb benchmark sample .... isn't it. Infact, for normal i.e. non 3D HD decoding, the beginning of "Planet Earth", from where "killa sampla" originates, is one of the best benchmark for HD decoding. If your hardware and driver are capable of decoding it, you are in for long term satisfaction .

It is a good benchmark but not a norm I would say, ...... if you remember correctly the previous time we had a discussion on killa sampla I mentioned, Almost all h263 MKVs are [email protected], Advance [email protected] are utmost rare, The "killa sampla" is the one with high profile @5.1 and with a 35mbps bitrate@full 1080p, it makes it an exception, so I would still say if your video card is not able to play it, it does not mean it is a fail, as most of the time in all probability one would not even play an mkv file with that advance profile .....but yes if you GPU is able to play the file smoothly you are good in all departments ...

 

[reignofchaos]

As i said, the opinion was based on my experience. It is well known that Nvidia has far better drivers and their VDPAU hardware acceleration APIs are the best supported acceleration APIs on Linux, which I use. So no FUD, only facts there .

Tough luck . I am using latest ubuntu, which has pretty latest nvidia drivers along with XBMC from git. No problems there in my HTPC for past three years . Regarding the dead chips, from what I remember, the problem was with a BETA driver, which they promptly fixed in the next beta. One should not really be using beta software. If you put steaming hot food in your mouth, you can't really complain about your mouth burning .

Not a beta - it was a WHQL driver that killed multiple GPUs.

Nvidia 320.18 WHQL Display Driver is Damaging GPUs | ModCrash

If a person installs a WHQL driver and then sees his beloved card just die, he/she is gonna be really mad for sure.

XBMC works just fine in ubuntu 12.04 on my 7970 via the XvBA back end. However I do my video playback in windows as there are much better options for video quality.

OpenGL is relevant for gaming but not so much for HTPC. I don't think gaming is a requirement for square_wave.

I have been using open source software exclusively for more than a decade and would really like Nvidia to open source their drivers/specs. However, keeping ideology aside, practically, I would prefer a working closed source driver over multiple shitty drivers like ATI for my day to day use. Last I tried, neither fglrx nor radeon drivers were capable of providing proper reliable hardware acceleration on Linux which is a must for a modern HTPC. Infact, Nvidia were the first to support HW accel in Linux and it took another 2-3 years for ATI to open their HW accel unit.

When was the last time you tried an AMD card? These days even the binary driver is pretty decent - check phoronix's video card reviews - the AMD cards are as fast as NVIDIA's cards in linux and reliable. Plus most cards have very reliable out of the box open source drivers that give 60-70% of the binary blob's performance. Unfortunately for nvidia, the open source driver is pretty much unusable.

Although I did not understand everything you said, from my knowledge, shader performance and precision is important for gaming and number crunching but not so much for HTPC. Sometimes, its cheaper to manufacture same hardware for all cards and enable/disable features through software/drivers and give higher precision/performace for the more expensive product. I don't see anything wrong with that. Even Microsoft does it with their Windows Home and Professional editions. As long as Nvidia did not advertise 1:24, I don't see a reason to complain.

I am not saying Nvidia > AMD/ATI in all scenarios. But for HTPC, I think its the best, based on my experience.

Shader performance is crucial even for video if you run a demanding renderer such as madVR. This is head and shoulders above the quality one gets via the usual path of letting the video card directly handle the presentation.

madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted) - Doom9's Forum

If you care about quality of the output, nothing else comes close.

As for nvidia, I'd not support a company that indulges in all sorts of unethical practices. Recently it removed certain features claiming to achieve feature parity on its linux driver - check this:

Nvidia Removed Linux Driver Feature For Feature Parity With Windows - Slashdot

 

[asliarun]

Valid points, musicbee and Sam. In fact there were problems with even hd4000 when used for htpc. I have also seen that htpc performance cannot always be extrapolated from gaming performance which is what most graphics cards really target.

However, if you see the review I linked, it specifically benchmarks and tests htpc performance and also mentions the fact that hd4600 solves the long standing problems with hd4000.

And yes, this gen of procs are too new for more feedback of real work usage so we shall have to wait and see.

A couple of months from now, valve and their hardware partners will announce various hardware configurations for what they call steam machines. These are nothing but gaming htpc machines that will run a custom Linux build being developed by valve and I think will boot with steam big picture mode (gaming equivalent of booting xbmc from a custom Linux build).

I think that vs team big picture may even support xbmc as an app, or you could customize it to open xbmc. This is valve's answer of bringing PC gaming to your TV like a console, which is also ironic since xbmc was also developed for the Xbox. Valve is also developing a new controller for this that will let you play PC games currently controlled with a keyboard and mouse from the valve controller.

Why I say all this is that in 3-6months, you will be able to use your htpc as a gaming console as well if you wanted, so having a little bit of overkill in terms of graphics performance would not be a bad idea.

I also strongly feel that the entry level steam machines will all be either haswell or Richland based. They will also have the lowest thermals and hence will have the smallest form factors.

 

[grunthos]

Slightly moving away from the benchmarks discussion

An alternative to building your own small-footprint mini-ATX model, is to buy one of these
VivoPC VM40B - ASUS VivoPC - ASUS
Asus launched them in India this weekend. Price starts from 20k for non-OS Celeron model to 46k for Corei5 Win 8 version

While it does not have a PCI slot (hence no option of adding a graphics card), the VivoPC otherwise makes for a very goodlooking front-end to park below your TV and play HD content. You can attach your external drive when you run out of space - or stream things from your NAS if you have one (it has wifi inbuilt). There are enough people who arent looking to play full 50 GB Bluray rips. Good quality 720p usually works just fine

 

[prome2005]

Haswell 35W parts availability is difficult in India (The series ends with T). I was able to find only 84W when I was going through Flipkart, Snapdeal, theitdepot etc. Please let me know if you had any luck in finding them