Hi all,

I have an A/V receiver and I want to build an HTPC to connect to it via HDMI, for audio and video listening.

This is my current list of specs for the HTPC:

Processor: Core i5 750
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD4
Memory: 4 GB DDR3
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 5850
HDD: 250 GB SSD
OS: Win7 32 bits
Remote: Gyration Air Music Remote

I'm buying the gyration because I don't want to have the TV switched on while listening to music. The gyration has an LCD screen that lets you control your music library from MCE or iTunes.

First problem, MCE and iTunes don't support WASAPI officially, and I don't want to use another software player for music because I will have to switch on the TV to be able to see what I'm doing. Is there any way to make MCE or iTunes bitstream the output signal using WASAPI or anything similar (skipping the kmixer) so I get a bit-perfect input stream into my A/V (so there is no loss).

Second, does the Radeon HD 5800 series support sample rates of 44.1 Khz as well as 48 Khz? This is because I have most of my music collection stored in FLAC @ 44.1 Khz, and I don't want it to be upscaled to 48khz by the sound card, loosing quality in this process.

I have been reading a lot of information and I'm still confused.

Thank you very much for your help.

I wouldn't get a 250 GB SSD, seems unnecessary and if it's a non-crappy one it's gonna cost like $700. The one to buy right now is the 80 GB Intel (new, 2nd gen) for the OS, then get a big HDD or two for data. It's always good to separate OS/programs with data/documents anyway.

Check out Anandtech's SSD articles for details, but the cheaper SSDs aren't worth crap. You want either an Indilinx-based SSD (the "cheap" good ones) or an Intel. Something interesting has happened though, that Intel came out with better SSDs, and a few weeks ago when I was comparing, Intel SSDs were actually cheaper per GB than Indilinx-based SSDs. You can also get the 160 GB/128 GB ones I guess, but they also seem unnecessarily expensive too to me, SSDs are going to drop in price very quickly in the coming months/years, they're just getting mainstream.

About WASAPI exclusive, I'm pretty sure the ATI device should (haven't tried the 5000 series, only the 4000) support it. With 24-bit though, you'll need the Realtek driver, instead of the one provided by ATI. You'll need to go to www.realtek.com.tw and download the ATI HDMI driver from there. Since you're using Windows 32-bit, you'll be able to use ReClock which is an audio renderer that can output WASAPI exclusive with Media Center and other DirectShow based players, like Media Player Classic Home Cinema.

44.1 is fine with the ATI HDMI devices.

BTW, the NDA was just lifted, the 5770 and 5750 are officially out. You might wanna check out those, the 5850 is very powerful, and if you're building an HTPC might be overkill.

And a noisy , electricity sucking overkill at that. Same goes for the processor, you will need a powerful fan/heatsink for it and it consumes a lot of power, more than required.

I don't know which software you intend to use for video display and if the graphics card supports acceleration of HD decoding, but: even with no hardware acceleration in the graphics card, a decent core 2 duo should happily decode hd content (my E6600 did). For a core 2 duo you can get practically inaudible coolers.

I don't agree about the CPU at all. There's no reason to buy a Penryn processor right now. I use a C2D E8400 which is more powerful and more energy efficient than the E6600, which I also had. Even with the 45 nm, 3.0 GHz E8400, I have some trouble decoding interlaced 1080p H.264. I can enable DXVA to offload with the GPU, but that's not always available, and my own setup requires DXVA to be disabled cause I process the video in a way which is not compatible.

And Nehalem is more efficient than Penryn. The Lynnfield processors are remarkably efficient, probably the most efficient ever, so far. I would even go as far as to suggest the OP get the i7 860, which adds a bit of a higher clock and hyperthreading, and can be had easily with the money saved from not getting the 250 GB SSD. The Lynnfield CPUs also gain from turbo mode, which raises the clock if you're not using all the cores, and at idle consume lower power than Core 2.

Thank you very much for your answers

I have reworked the configuration based on your suggestions:

Processor: Core i7 860
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD4
Memory: 4 GB DDR3
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 5770/5750
HDD: 80 GB SSD
OS: Win7 32 bits
Remote: Gyration Air Music Remote

I don't need the 250 GB SSD, as I was planning to buy a Buffalo NAS as well, for storing all the media. Maybe I will have to go for Gigabit ethernet instead of 10/100 for the BD ISOs streaming.

I will have to study the processor configuration also, as I don't want a noisy HTPC. I don't care too much about power consumption, as I will use it only for media/game playing, which means 3 hours a day at most. But I don't want it to be noisy.


Thanks again for your help.

For a HTPC that's overkill.

I was doing TV computers in November of 2004. The first machine was a single core Sempron 2500 on an ECS-K7VTA3 mobo with a Radeon 9200. It was running XP Pro SP2 with the ATI software that came with the HDTV Wonder card. It did not have a lot of horsepower but it was sufficient to record / play and use like a TiVo. That machine has been given away and it was replaced with single core Athlon XP 3200 which is also retired for a Gigabyte mobo and a 2.8 GHz Athlon X2 (phenom 1 with 2 bad cores) which has way more than sufficient power. BTW it idles at 95 watts for the entire machine.

Audio is far less CPU intensive than HD video. It typically loafs along between 2 and 10% when in record or play of HD video.

G²

I think that last configuration he made up is all right. Like I said, even my E8400 which is one of the more powerful C2Ds out there suffers with 1080i H.264 content. Any Core 2 Quad is bound to be more power hungry and less powerful than a Lynnfield proc. And Lynnfield CPUs are all around better than AMD's offerings. If Clarkdale, the Nehalem dual-core (4 threads) was out already, I'd agree that maybe that's a better option for HTPC, but it's still months away. If the OP wants to wait, then OK, but Lynnfield can also help with video encoding and other things one might do on an HTPC.

The GPU, 5750 should be fine and probably a bit overkill, but some extra power is never a bad thing, especially here where these new 40 nm GPUs are so efficient. Idle power is rated at 16 W, and in tests both Lynnfield and the ATI 5000 series are top notch in power efficiency. You still need a moderately powerful GPU for stuff like deinterlacing and other processing. I have to use my 4670 for instance for that, instead of the 4550 that I don't use on the HTPC cause it doesn't provide me with Vector Adaptive deinterlacing.

I use Thermaltake coolers. They're probably the least flashy, but they're freaking efficient at what they do. Look for the tower ones. I use the Ultra Extreme 120 with a 1200 RPM or so fan, keeps the C2Q 9450 cool even overclocked to 3.0 GHz. I use a smaller version with less heatpipes and a 90 mm fan (also very low RPM, like 1000, which is inaudible) on the 3.0 GHz Core 2 duo E8400, also keeps very cool. Your case also needs to be good. I use Antec P180 and a P180 mini. The mini has a 200 mm fan and a 120 mm one, which I took out and taped paper over it, so no air comes in from that hole. The 200mm fan on top is pulling air at its lowest RPM, all the way from below, where there's a 400 W fanless PSU. I also have a fanless Ati 4670 there which also keeps very cool, never goes higher than 55°C or so.

I can't argue if someone says that a Core 2 Duo has suffered performance problems for them.

But since you are interested in transporting audio bitstreams over HDMI, you will probably want to transport the HD audio content of blue ray as well, e.g. TrueHD or DTS-HD MA. Here I can only raise a question because I simply don't know enough myself, but it appears that you need a fully HDMI capable sound card for that, such as the Sonar HDAV or an Auzentech Hometheater HD. Otherwise you will "only" listen to the lossy Dolby and DTS, according to a computer magazine article I recently read.

The other question is if you really need the lossless stuff because you can actually hear the difference. But that is an entirely different topic

Right now TrueHD is not a problem. You cannot bitstream, but you can fully decode it with ffdshow and output through 7.1 LPCM. If you don't care about menus, you can use MPC-HC to play most bluray movies directly from the disc, provided you have AnyDVD HD (which is a must for HTPC to begin with, IMO). The only "problem" right now is with DTS-HD MA and HR, for which there's no feasible decoder available, thus bitstreaming it is the only solution for lossless sound out of it. The commercial programs that can decode it always output 16-bit 48 kHz so anything higher than that will get downsampled to those parameters. But the thing is, how many movies are higher than 16/48? Turns out it's a bit more than half. The majority of which is only 24/48, so you only get 24-to-16 bit downsampling. Maybe that's audible? I don't know.

Anyway, the 5000 series can bitstream DTS MA and TrueHD, but they right now are only reported to work with PowerDVD 9, which as a player is buggy, bloated and crappy as hell because of that. Cyberlink's also probably the most consumer unfriendly company I've dealt with in the HTPC world. There is some hope/suspicion that TotalMedia Theatre will support it too, but there's also hope that open source or free players will also be able to bitstream.

So, the only problem right now it's DTS-HD full decoding. Which only a minority of discs has, of which a bit less than half don't have trouble cause they're already 16/48. At that point, for that relatively small number of DTS HD discs, you can just take some time and remux to mkv with flac audio if you care about lossless THAT much. Or you can just relax and play the movie with the DTS "core" track, which at 1.5 Mbps is also pretty good. Anyway, the two ways of solving this problem are either to get a good, reliable DTS-HD decoder, or to get it bitstreamed.

Thank you very much again

I think I would give a try to PowerDVD. In case it's too buggy and unusable, I will "survive" with LPCM till there is a fair software player that can bit-stream DTS-MA with the ATI.

The specs maybe overkill for media playing, but I think I could replace my Xbox 360 with it.

Best regards

The Powerdvd 9 patch that enables bitstreaming is not ready yet, and nobody knows when they'll release it. The tests at review sites were done with a special PowerDVD 9 beta build given to reviewers. Given my past misfortunes with Cyberlink, I would recommend at least you wait until the patch has come out, and people confirm it works. Just then buy it and start your own testing. If you buy it right now, and the patch comes out after your return window of a month, you won't be able to try it out.

You could switch to the less expensive Core i5 wich provides nearly the same performance.

OK. Thank you very much again for all this information.

I'd go for the cheapest i5 and HD 5770 (to be more future proof, not that you really need it for video - just for case you want to play some games). If you don't really need lightning-fast system boot, I would skip SSD altogether since you don't need that for regular operation of a HTCP (the HD streams max. at like 7MB/s sequential access which is a piece of cake even for the slowest of hard drives). If you just need fast OS and app boot, I'd go for an Indilinx-controlled SSD with 40GB max. (if something like that even sells) and buy some "green" 5400rpm 1TB hard drive for media storage (as they usually tend to be more quiet).
You can always just put the HTPC to sleep (suspend to RAM) and not care about SSD, IMHO.

I jumped the gun and bought a 5750 and the powerDVD 9 ultra and...well the bitstreaming of HD audio doesn't work as you guys already know!! I didn't realize the "working" release was only available to reviewers. It would of been nice had this of been more plainly spelled out for trigger happy people like myself. Perhaps they will release a working copy to the rest of the world some day that bought their product under the expectations the features mentioned were enabled.

My experience with Cyberlink has been horrible. I like may others am stuck in PowerDVD 8.0.2217, which is an old build of the previous version. With every update they introduced bugs and "protection", and the only way I have to play blurays without much trouble is to use that version/build plus AnyDVD HD. PowerDVD 7.3 (also up to a certain build) is arguably even better, less bloated and will play HD-DVDs.

The point is that their updates often break stuff that was working before. By the time PowerDVD 9 came out (which I bought and returned) it was already riddled with bugs and some weird protection that made the program crash constantly if the planets were not aligned correctly. I'd recommend you return it if they haven't released the working patch within your return window (I think one month), and re-buy it if/when they do.

When PowerDVD 8 came out by the way, we were also told a later patch would enable bitstreaming, CL support even told some users about the mythical PowerDVD 8.5. Yeah, they decided to rename it "9" and charge 100 bucks for what basically amounts to a lot of bloat.

There are other options that are free (if you already have AnyDVD HD which you should) for playing bluray and HD DVD content, but you have to forgo menus and DTS-HD MA playback is still not feasible easily, but they're getting there fast. You might find that you don't even need PowerDVD. On a side note, TotalMedia Theatre may support the ATI 5000 cards (unconfirmed).

I am pretty certain the i5 750 uses less power and runs cooler than your core 2 duo would. Its a significant die shrink and power requirements dropped too. I know the heatsink fan that comes with it is smaller and lighter than the core 2 duo's I've had.

Any of the new AMD 5000 series cards would work and as they include HDMI that would cover sound and video. It's up to you how much video power (and fan noise) you want in your HTPC. All of them use significantly less power, and cooling, than comparable cards.

P.S. (edit) the AMD 5000 series can decode h.264 on the GPU taking load off the CPU also. For gaming and viewing the i5 750 is probably plenty. If you are going to be encoding a lot, then the i7 860 with hyperthreading would make more sense (which is what I have for mine).

people are trying to add bitstreaming of the hd formats to ffdshow, the ffdshow topic on doom9 might be worth checking out if your interested.

Just an idea... I have a HTPC for 2 years now with a projector screen and the remote I recently bought for it is a iPod Touch with 8Gb with Wi-fi.
Apple has a small FREE app called Remote that lets you control iTunes via wifi using the touch interface with cover navigation, albuns and the works!
Finally I'm able to put music on the media center without turning on the projector screen.

In terms of performance I have many mp3 an the interface is quicker in iPod than if I use the media center interface...

Great feature

Just for the record:
Processor: AMD 4850e 2.5 Ghz (low power) with Artic Cooler
Case: Antec Fusion 2
Graphiics: ATI HD 3200 Radeon (integrated on MB)
Memory: 4 Gb
Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit

I have only one 10 cm fan that came with case working in Low power and I have 46º C after several hours working with the media center. The computer is quiter than the projector...

Also I play all my media files including hd (even 1080p) .mkv in media center using ffdshow. I don't need any other sw besides iTunes to use the remote app in iPod. I use K-lite for 64 bit codec pack.

I also use the Media Control plugin for media center for fast forwarding of .mkv files.