Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to Pauls hardware i am back after a bit of a hiatus after coputex but then jumping right back into things with my June builds video this is part of my monthly build series every month at the beginning of the month I hired out a couple systems I build one of them during the middle of the month and then hopefully some time towards the end of the month I actually test it give you guys some performance numbers and some feedback on the build process so starting out for this week everything is fueled by you guys and I asked for your feedback by the way if you want to see any actual build since I'm not building anything today check out my builds playlist I'll link that in the description but last month I asked what PC builds do you guys want to see in June and overwhelmingly more than a third of you guys voted for the ultimate home theater PC which I'm very happy about because I've actually put this home theater PC option on the list for quite a few months in the hopes that it would be chosen at some point not finally has I will be building my ultimate home theater PC but I have to confess that this month's part parts list were a little bit difficult to actually put together there's weird things going on right now like the imminent launch of a couple big platforms from both Intel and Intel and AMD there's the current issue with graphics cards being difficult to find due to aetherium mining and other cryptocurrency mining that's going on out there that's making the prices go up for AMD cards in particular and make them really hard to find and with Nvidia cards is starting to affect them as well so all that taking into can end them into consideration feel free to vote for next month's builds which is also linked in the description what do you want to see in July put a pretty wide variety of options there so you guys can choose which one you feel would most suit your needs or that you most like to see but actually only have one build for this month so this is my $1,250 silent familis home theater PC and this is not the system that I may be building later this month although if you guys ask for strongly enough maybe I'll consider putting something together like this now I went with a idea from the get-go here that this was going to be a higher-end system didn't decide till later on that the graphics cards graphics capabilities we're pretty much going to need to be nerfed if it was going to stay families that's why a couple of the parts are higher ends but it's meant to potentially be able to drop in a higher-end graphics card if you decide you're willing to deal with a little bit of fan noise in return for a lot more gaming performance so we've got a core i5 7,500 T processor if you guys are wondering why I didn't go with Rison for this one because there are 65 watt TDP processors for on the new Rison platform that would be great options I wanted a family schooler I decided on this no fan CR 95 C fanless cooler and basically I'm not I'm not confident that this has an amp or mounting bracket yet so for that reason I went with Intel this time around so for the main processor I have an i5 7500 T this is the low-power version of the quad core i5 so kind of like a 7600 K but no overclocking and it runs at a lower frequency it's still a reasonably high price it's a little over 200 bucks so this is a significant part of this budget however you can keep that cool with something that is familis because it's only got a 35 watt TDP this actually has a 95 watt dissipation capacity for the no fancy are 95 C but I wanted it to stay relatively cool so 35 watt TDP CPU this beastly big old fan was cooler and you should be good to go and keep your temperatures down and not have to worry about any think it's getting too warm in there I also had to pay close attention to the motherboard because with this massive cooler you actually very very frequently lose the top slot to the top PCI Express slot on the motherboard and no fan actually has a charter on their site that tells you specifically which motherboards that does that with basically you need a motherboard where the top slot is one of these single slot deals like here on this asrock board versus having these x16 slot on the top that gives you a little bit more space so you can still fit the graphics card in the by 16 slot that meant that Mini ITX was out as well because that top slot is too close for and pretty much any situation you have there and I did want to add a supplemental graphics card so of the current generation compatible with KB Lake motherboards that are out there pretty much as rack was the only one who had a few that did to have that configuration and I went with the asrock h1 10m HDS it's only $52 probably the biggest downfall here is going to be the audio solution that you have but other than that it's got all the connectivity you'd want for the CPU memory and everything else that you're going to plug into this system for memory since we don't have to care about aesthetics internally in here at all just with the Corsair Vengeance lpx kit low-profile solid good compatibility and mainly the low profile things that I was looking again for clearance with that CPU cooler I wanted plenty of storage I wanted a 2 terabyte SSD but I ended up going with the Bushkin reactor 1 terabyte because again that's a pretty significant part of the price I wanted to have plenty of storage for media and that kind of thing that would be able to be called up quickly and especially if you're doing DVR capabilities with this that's important so price per gigabyte this is the cheapest one terabyte SSD that you can get right now that's the current generation product there of course plenty of other options in here but 250 bucks for one terabyte is pretty much as good as it's going to get right now when it comes to a big SSD with plenty of performance it actually makes more sense to get 2 of those 1 terabyte SSDs as opposed to like one of the two terabyte SSDs because those start around 6 or probably 700 bucks at the minimum right now going back to a family stuff we have the pallets geforce gtx 750ti calm x video card and here's another one where i was just sort of confused and had to figure stuff out first off and passively cooled a gtx 1050 Ti so for 1080 gameplay it's going to do just fine it's difficult to find in the u.s. couldn't find it listed it just about any retailer right now except one called bonanza that where it's available for a hundred and eighty dollars it's a little bit easier to find actually if you're in like the UK that you like Europe area because I know that's very general but it just seems to be like there's more fanless PC fans over there if you got another option here's an XFX familis rx 460 again I think the price on this is higher than it should be due to the aforementioned aetherium cryptocurrency mining that's going on but it is famis it will allow you to do 1080 gameplay and also connect up your 4k monitors and whatever else you want to do or 4k a home theater television and you know get get off the ground if you can't find that pilot card for the case I checked out quite a few home theater PC cases I ended up deciding on a 5min EC its micro ATX first of all so it matches with the motherboard it's practical case so it's got a nice clean design so it should fit in in a living room environments and I've actually built in this case actually my current HTPC is in this case I did choose the family I'm sorry the side panel version that is solid not not with the window like this one so that means it's going to block the interior view as well as the noise because we don't want any leds or anything like that the shining out for us now quiet PC comm is actually where I browse for quite a few things today as I was just doing some research on this and actually have a listing here of a bunch of other options for really quiet HTPC cases that have been more designed for a living room environment street comp has quite a few as actually interested in this one further down the cool tech cool cube Mac cv4 which is an aluminum case doesn't look terribly expensive only about 51 pounds on the quiet PC site and comes in black or silver and micro ATX and seems like a good option but again pretty much impossible to find in the US so that I'm mainly given this as a shout-out to you guys over in Europe who might actually be able to get your hands on some of this stuff sticking with families we have to have a family our supplies as well so we have the C Sonic 520 watt 80 plus platinum fully modular you know it's it's a sea sonic it's really solid build quality it gets a job done hey JD + platinum it's really hard to find much higher wattage in this with the fanless power supply but fortunately you don't need much beyond that now I wanted to say at the beginning of this video and I forgot to but I'll say it now that one of the big questions you should ask yourself if you're building a home theater PC is do you want cable a lot of people don't because cable cutting has become very popular and if you have an internet connection you can probably get access to all the stuff you want however a lot of people do have cable a lot of people want to still have cable they might have shows what they like to watch that they can't access otherwise and having cable in your htpc at least if you're in the US is a little bit of a challenge depending on how you go about it my recommendation if you want a direct cable connection cable not over-the-air is to go something that has a CableCARD solution you rent the cable card from your cable provider whoever that happens to be they should provide it to you for free some of them will carry two to five bucks a month rental costs for it which sucks but that's usually less than a 10 to 15 bucks they charge you for a DVR and then you can build your own HTPC that has all the DVR capabilities you want I have a Seton Card C eto n and that company is pretty much toast at this point they have gone out of the business but their cards still work they're still functional and the problem is that it's really difficult to get them to work with Windows 10 so my htpc right now is still based on Windows 7 here's another option though this is an external silicon dust HD homerun Prime it has a cable card slot at the back so right there in that M card slot is where the cable card goes in connects to your network and then you can actually connect up to three computers to be simultaneously watching you know cable TV broadcasts at the same time they have a chart here for the differences between their product it's only about a hundred twenty-five bucks and again it's external which is nice if you don't have room inside if you don't have expansion slots for something like a PCI Express device if you don't want cable then just don't get this and get everything from the internet that's that's the other option in there but I wanted to include that for people who want to keep cable and that also ties into my second sort of build which isn't really a building I'm getting ahead of myself finally I've got this device which is a basically a remote you want a remote for a htpc this one's by B bite or whatever but it's inexpensive it's only about 15 bucks Kodi remote and it's also got a backlit mini wireless keyboard on the back so you can type in stuff as well as using it as the remotes works a bunch of different stuff but it's PC compatible so it will work with Windows to control windows stuff and there you go that's pretty much all the stuff you would need for an HTP see again this one's a little bit on the higher end it's well over $1200 it is completely familis and passively cooled though so that's kind of the main thing about it it would be silent so for watching movies or anything else you want to watch and hear the audio for nice and clear I think that would be a great option now again I'm going to be building what is my ultimate home theater PC and I actually have some questions at some dilemmas overcome so my career HTPC has been in service for well over a couple years now and I have a couple other videos on HCPCS on my channel if you guys want to check it out it was like literally nothing but a bunch of stuff laying out on the desk at one point I had a bunch of hard drives and raid5 configured in there at some point as well but all of this internal stuff is still in use I've just swapped it over to the fractal define mini see which I did I guess in November of last year define mini C is currently living out in my living room which I should hopefully have a shot of here in just a second so there's my living room actually have a new TV now but it sits over here on the right side and it's been doing a great job although you know it gets dusty and stuff like that so stays quiet but here's what I want to do for the next version the next generation my ultimate home theater PC if I want to be able to get cable TV signals and have the DVR capability I wanted to be able to game I want to be able to do modern games which means like DirectX 10 I'm sorry DirectX 12 Windows 10 support would kind of be needed in there finally I want it to be not fanless I don't think I can go that route but I want to be as quiet as possible and therein lies my dilemma so if I want to stick with CableCARD then I basically need to either run Windows 7 or I need to figure out how to shoehorn Windows Media Center which is the current functional updates and gets all the broadcast listings and everything utility or software in Windows that works for home theater pcs they they removed it with Windows 10 you can still get it and install it with Windows 10 but I've searched the forums and there's like it's like hit or miss sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't so I'm considering taking my existing HTPC once again which is based on a Maximus 5 gene z77 motherboard it has an Intel Ivy Bridge 35 70 K in it I believe and then it also has of course the Seton Fortuner cable card as well as it's got a big hard drive in there and sisty so if i want to stick with what works I'll probably stay on Windows 7 and use the core components from that system to be one part of my HTPC have that working and it always on and functional as the DVR but then have it put the DVR'd captured footage into a shared folder that I can then access with a secondary system that I also build that's much more powerful that runs Windows 10 that probably has a different UI or interface something like Kodi that I might be able to use Kodi it's Cody right now Cody it's all that it's to say I need your guys's help in choosing what I should do first off should I stick with cable that requires cable card of course it requires Windows 7 unless I want to try some janky Windows 10 workarounds that may or may not work it would also require me to keep using my existing htpc core components because it's got Windows 7 and it is functional already also my wife might veto that so bear that in mind as well because she has some TV shows if she likes to watch should buy HTTP see be based on dual systems again I'm considering taking one system having it always-on having that be the system that does the DVR capture having a secondary system that I turn on when I want to actually watch TV that has access to the DVR stuff and that it's much more powerful and capable of VR and that kind of stuff because I definitely want this to be a VR capable HTPC or maybe you don't care maybe I don't don't care about those things finally should I build all of this in a pre-made case at one of those pretty cool HTPC cases that you might have seen that already exist should I do a custom or scratch-built case since I might potentially be building a system with like two micro ATX builds in it or something like that or maybe got the wall mounted root because I could do that too if you didn't notice in my living room I have a decent amount of space I can't see it very well here but I have a decent amount of space right there to the right of the television so thinking about doing something vertical right there just mount everything to the wall and have it have it be there so that's pretty much all I've got for you today guys thank you so much for watching this video of course let me know by voting on those straw polls what you think I should do as far as my next steps for my ultimate HTPC build let me know what you think of that passively cool fanless HTTP as well thought that was pretty cool of course a challenge to get all of that together if you're worried about price to performance and you also want to keep everything family but of course it depends up button too if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you want to see more just like it I'll be back with more videos coming very soon and we'll see you next time