Advice on "high end" HTPC

godskitchen

Hello all, a friend of mine is wanting to build a HTPC, his must haves are:

1Tb of storage - I suggested two 500Gb drives, something like - Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM
http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=327715

192 KHz sound card - he wants to rip CD's lossless (hence 1Tb) he wont be moved on this as he has speakers and an amp worth over £5000. I dont know too much about sound cards................any advice would be great guys, he will also want it to have either Optical or Coax out put...........he doesnt trust the quality of 3.5mm mini jack to Coax.............dont ask! Price is not an issue.

As for the rest i have advised him to go for something like the
Intel E6600
2Gb of RAM
Club3D GeForce 8800GTS 640MB GDDR3

Its mostly going to be a media center, he wont play games on it ever, i know the graphics card might be over kill but its going to be hooked up to a 42" Sony 1080p LCD.

He also wants a Dual tuner DVB TV card............any thoughts?

Any advice would be great guys, i am finding it hard to find the best bits......what would you use?

Any good websites that do HTPC's?

Thanks in advance!

8T8

An audiophile I take it I, £5000 on amp/speakers :eek:

I don't know why he is so concerned about 3.5mm jack to coax the signal is digital is it not, it's 1 & 0's a cable cant affect that in any way it either works or it doesn't

For soundcards the C-Media Oxygen HD looks to fit the bill, review here to see if that's what he requires, the Auzentech banded card can be bought from OcUK.

The graphics card is total overkill get a 7950GT with a passive cooler instead it will drive the display just fine and is more than enough for GPU assisted video decoding for HD-DVD or Blu-ray should the scenario arise.

As for dual DVB-T get anyone really the signal is digital so it doesn't matter too much though driver support would be a factor I suppose to make sure it is well supported.

What media centre software is he going to be using ?

There are a variety of places you can acquire hardware from but full HTPC's are so easy to come by usually they are stock built out of parts & build to order ones seems to be gone from Komplett's site at least.

Check out for HTPC cases & more:
Quiet PC
Kustom PC
Along with Komplett.ie, Dabs.ie, Pixmania.ie & OcUK for various bits of hardware.

SouperComputer

Take a look at hush-technolgies.com for some nice HTPC's

For sound, you will be using SPDIF passthrough, so the sound card will be of no consequence. Ie it will just fire the digital stream, unmolested down the optical port from its source, be it DVD or audio CD. This applies to his 192KHz "obsession" too.

FLAC is probably the best suited codec for storing the audio.

godskitchen

8T8..............thanks for that, he will be going with the graphics card you recommended!

SouperComputer...........what your saying is even if he uses on board sound with SPDIF passthrough there will be no loss in sound? so it will push through 192KHz?

SouperComputer

SouperComputer...........what your saying is even if he uses on board sound with SPDIF passthrough there will be no loss in sound? so it will push through 192KHz?

Well, yes and no. It will "passthrough" the signal source. So if its less then 192Khz (im not sure if he means 16 or 24bit) . So there will be no loss from the source digital signal to the amp. In any case, CD's are only 16bit so you have a loss of "quality" off the bat.

Like anything analog or digital the quality is only as good as its souce.