450$ Living Room HTPC/Light gaming/Atom MiniITX/5570

[jackoakwood]

I'm going to build little HTPC for the living room, mostly to pull duty displaying h.264 video on the tv. I've got gigabit ethernet in the wall, and will be pulling the video off a server in the basement. Since it's a living room pc, my primary concern is no noise and low power consumption. However, I'd like to be able to play a little Starcraft on the big screen tv once in a while, which is why I want to put a discrete video card in the little guy, instead of just going with an ION setup.

So I think my starting point is going to be an Antec ISK 300-150 mini itx case. It seems like this is about as small as a case gets while still having room for a (half-height) PCIE card. My plan at this point is to take out the PSU and stick in a PicoPSU-160-XT with an external brick. The case comes with an 80mm fan but apparently not a very good one, so I thought I'd replace it with a Scythe Kama Flow 2 80; moves a bit more air more quietly.

Now to the Mobo: I've decided I want to go with one of the newer dual-core atom CPUs. It's irritating that there don't seem to be hardly any mini-itx mobos with both a PCIe x16 slot AND gigabit ethernet onboard. Is this due to limitations on the total size of the PCIe bus on Atoms? So the Jetway JNC94FL-510-LF is the mobo I am provisionally going to use, despite the fact that it has only 100mbit ethernet onboard. The only mobo I've found that seems to fit my ideal requirement of gigabit and PCIex16 (/4) is the Supermicro X7SPA-H Server Motherboard, which actually sports two gigabit ports, but doesn't have audio, of all things! Anyone out there got a better motherboard suggestion? As I said, what I'd like is an Atom D510/d525 mobo that has both PCIex16 (even if it's only got four active lanes) AND gigabit ethernet. Or should I consider just getting a board that only has ONE active lane on a PCIex16 slot, like Zotac makes? Irritating compromises... Power usage should be about 45 watts peak for the board, RAM and SSD

For the GPU, I think I'm going with the HIS Silence H557HR1G Radeon HD 5570. This seems to be the most powerful low profile fanless GPU on the market. It uses 43 watts at peak. Alternatively, if this one seems too hot or too thirsty for watts, I might downgrade to the HIS H545H1G Radeon HD 5450; a lot less muscle but probably runs a lot cooler.

For the OS drive, I'm going to install an OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTX40G. Forty gigs ain't much, but I wasn't planning on doing much local storage on this box, and this drive has an amazing amount of bang for the buck, at about a hundred dollars and as fast as anything out there. It also adds no noise and very little heat to the system.

Finally, a couple of sticks of PQI POWER Series 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 RAM tops out the system.

Optional components would be some kind of multi-card reader in the optical drive slot, and possibly a high-speed high capacity 2.5 inch hard drive for local media storage. I don't need or want an optical drive in the system.

For a remote, I'll use Lenovo's awesome little 57Y6336 RF keyboard/trackball remote.

So what I end up with here is, I think, a pretty fast little media player with only a single fan in the case which I hope to be able to clock down to the point where it can't be heard at all from more than a meter away. I think it will come in under a hundred watts peak load and I ought to be able to play a few games on the tv sometimes...

A few questions:
Does my wattage count look all right here? I think even at peak load I am going to be well within the Pico's 160w limit.
Any better suggestions for mobos? As I said I really hate getting stuck with low speed ethernet just for the PCIex16 here.
The CPU won't be a bottleneck on the GPU in this setup, will it?
Should I consider a CULV Core2Duo with a passive cooling setup instead of the Atoms?

[ilovejedd]

To be honest, I highly doubt the HD 5570 is going to be much of an improvement. There's just too much CPU bottleneck. In fact, I'd even hazard to say that the ION is already too much GPU for the Atom. And yes, I've tried playing SC2 on the ION.

[jackoakwood]

Thanks for your insight. Apropos of bottlenecking, there's a pretty useful article at anandtech comparing Atom, CULV Core 2, and Core i3 boards in the form factor we're interested in here. They bench systems based on all three with and without a discrete graphics card. The results jibe with what you are saying. Check out the gaming benchmarks, in particular.

Interestingly, according to these results, at least, it looks like the new boards based on the last generation Core 2 are going to be pretty bottlenecky too; Atom with ION sees virtually no improvement in framerates with a good GPU in the PCIe slot, and Core 2 duo improves but not by a lot.

Based on these kinds of numbers, it looks like the best bet for what I want is going to be a downclocked Core i3 with some kind of beastly passive cooling system. Much more difficult to cool than an Atom, unfortunately.

Anyone else have any input?

[Matthew]

I have an atom/ion board, and I play Starcraft 2 on it.
I overclocked the board to 2.0 GHz though, and not all boards let you do that. I don't think any of the intel ones do. I have an Asus at3iont-i.
It runs well enough on low detail at 1280x1024. I occasionally get a message at the bottom of the screen recommending that I lower the graphics settings (which are already as low as they can go), and it doesn't look nearly as nice as the screenshots on the box, but I'm okay with that.

There are many youtube videos of people playing SC2 on nettops with ION. Looking at those is a good way to see if you're comfortable with the look and framerate for a particular set of hardware. That's what I did before I put my box together.

With an atom at stock speeds though, and a picture on a bigger screen, I don't think it would be playable.
And even if it was playable, it kind of seems like a waste to play on low detail on your TV.

The rest of your setup looks fine. SSDs are awesome fast, and you'll definitely be under 160 watts.

[ilovejedd]

With the ION and SC2, 1080p might be a stretch. However, it's fairly playable at 720p Low. Amazingly, the Core i3-530 with iGPU totally smoked the Atom 330/ION combo playing at 1360x768 Low. I think I was getting double the framerates with the i3-530 compared to the Atom/ION. In the latter's defense though, the ION was capable of Medium settings in some scenarios whereas the i3-530's iGPU just wasn't up to the task. Still, once you've got a number of units, the Atom just becomes a major bottleneck.

[CA_Steve]

Gaming always skews your hardware needs. No gaming? i3 sounds great. Unfortunately, SC II relies upon a fast 2 core CPU and a mainstream gpu for optimum performance.

Theoretically, you could play it at a lower resolution with an i3 or other integrated solution..but if you are going to the trouble of playing it on an 1080p screen, why not get some pleasure out of it?

Here's a couple of benchmark reviews from PC games hardware.
august cpu

beta cpu results

Some gpu benchmarks:

hardware canucks
Tom's Hardware
guru of 3d

So, really, you want a dual core cpu that can go 3GHz or better and then pair that with a middle of the road GPU (HD5770 or gtx 460) with a low idle /load power profile. I still like the i3/i5 for their low system power. i5 brings turbo boost as well. Too bad there still isn't a desktop version of Optimus (my perennial gripe).

[ilovejedd]

So, really, you want a dual core cpu that can go 3GHz or better and then pair that with a middle of the road GPU (HD5770 or gtx 460) with a low idle /load power profile. I still like the i3/i5 for their low system power. i5 brings turbo boost as well. Too bad there still isn't a desktop version of Optimus (my perennial gripe).

Among the i5's, only the quad-core i5-750 and i5-760 have Turbo Boost modes worth mentioning (+533MHz in dual-core). The Core i5-6xx Clarkdales only goes up 133MHz which is pretty negligible. Better off overclocking the i3-530/540.

The GTX 460 isn't totally necessary. With a decent CPU, even a GTS 250 can handle Ultra at 1920x1080. However, those wishing to play with AA enabled (trust me, you'd want to) at Ultra would need a GTX 460 or higher card. Playing it on a Core i7-860 + GTS 250 and I've had to drop down settings to High for smooth gameplay. Frankly though, all the eye-candy on Ultra tends to be annoying while playing so I'm quite happy to stick to High. In fact, the difference in graphics quality from Medium -> High and High -> Ultra isn't really that much although from Low -> Medium is a big jump.

*sigh* I'm wishing for Optimus, too. Oh well, at least the newer cards have trimmed down their idle power consumption somewhat.