Mark and Angela's Life: HTPC Build

A few people have asked about the PC build so I thought I’d post about it. This post contains a lot of info so if you’d like to cut to the chase, scroll down to the last 6 or 7 pictures.

Ok, here goes... We’re not the cable TV types... I know from experience if I have cable/dish, I’d watch it. And I don’t need any reasons to watch more TV. So, we still use a antenna. My experience is it’s a better picture than cable anyway. The HD on the plasma is awesome! One thing that’s always bugged me though was not being able to get the HD digital equivalent of a VCR... Sure, there are DVR’s available, but they all come with monthly fees that’s more or less for nothing more than a TV guide. So, I’m the type of person to build my own. And while I’m at it, I want to be able to play games on it, load my flight sim on it, and surf the web, all with full surround sound coming through the stereo. Sounded like a fun project ;-)

My requirements were simple:

Able to record TV in full HD quality
Ability to play some decent PC games
Ability to handle my flight sim, X-Plane (can’t wait to see that thing on the big flat screen!)
Internet connection to explore the internet TV thing
And since the PC will be in the living room, it has to be quiet

Now, for anyone that knows a bit about gaming PCs, that last one is the kicker! In order to play decent games, you need a good video card... and all good video cards now-a-days come with really loud fans on them. Why didn’t we just buy a store bought PC especially since they don’t really suffer from this? Well, store bought PCs can’t really handle decent games ;-) Plus I don’t like all that additional crap that’s loaded on them... I like efficiency.

So after a decent amount of research here’s what I came up with (see picture below the list):

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition (not shown)
Case: Lian Li PC-C33B Home Theater PC (HTPC) case. This is the big black box in the center of the back of the picture (the top cover is removed). HTPC’s are made to look like a piece of stereo equipment to “blend in” with the remainder of your gear
Power Supply: SeaSonic X650 Gold 650W (black & gold box at left-rear). Probably overkill on the amount of power, but this is a very efficient power supply, and the fan only runs when needed so it’s quiet
Motherboard: Intel DP55KG Extreme Series (black, flat box on right)
Processor: Intel Core i5-750, Quad Core (front and center)
Hard Drives (2): Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (plastic wrapped items at front left). 500GB for the operating system; 1TB for storage. Storage is cheap these days!
Video Card: Gigabyte GV-R4890C-1GB Radeon HD 4890 (big blue box right, front)
TV Tuner Card: Hauppage WinTV-HVR-2250 with remote (white and red box in the center)
Optical Disk Drive: LG BH10LS30 Blu-Ray Disc Re-Writer (white “Super Multi Blue” box on left). This will read and write just about every type of disk up through Blu-Rays!
Memory: Corsair XMS3 PC3-12800, 4GB total (barely visible at the top right of pic)
The blue, black & brown box at the top left of the picture is a heat-sink for the Processor (Noctua NH-U9B SE 2). The stock fans used to cool processors can be pretty noisy so I sprung for a more quiet aftermarket solution

Lets get started!

To my surprise the PC case was much longer depth-wise than I was expecting. I researched a lot, but overlooked this detail. It soon became apparent I would need to cut a hole in the rear of our cabinet in order to clear the cables that would be sticking out the back of the PC. So, I made a template of the back of the PC out of cardboard and used that to mark the hole.

The fans you see were installed a while back to pull the heat from the enclosed cabinet generated by our stereo receiver. Before the fans were installed temps inside would get to almost 120 degrees! After the fans temps maxed ~80. The fans are 120mm Noctua NF-S12B ULNs and only turn 700 RPMs so they’re almost inaudible. They can only be heard when everything in the house is off including the central heat and air!

Here’s a shot of the hole with the PC case temporarily put in place showing how close the rear of it is to the back of the cabinet. It’s actually so close I had to make some notches to clear the top cover screws. I could’ve just cut the upper edge a little higher, but that left little margin between making the hole big enough to clear everything and keeping it smaller than the PC so it’s not visible from the front.

I wanted a wired internet connection for this setup so I needed to run a cable for it. In the room where our router is I replaced the single jack wall-plate with a dual-jack wall-plate. One jack is the input to the DSL modem (what already existed); the other jack (the new one) will be used to connect an output from the router that will go the HTPC. This jack is on the opposite side of the wall I plan on putting the new wall-plate the HTPC will connect to so that’s pretty convenient.

Here are a couple shots of the hole I cut and the new network jack installed for the HTPC. The dual jack wall-plate is on the opposite side of the wall you see here. The jack in the photo is connected to the dual jack wall-plate by a short 2-ft Cat5 network cable in the wall.

After all that prep-work it was time to start building the PC!

1st thing I did was remove the hard drive cage and install the 2 hard drives (500GB on top; 1TB on bottom). The hard drive cage slides in place and attaches by the single thumb screw you see at the bottom.

Next I removed the optical drive cage and installed the Blu-Ray disc writer.

Next in was the power supply. The better power supplies now-a-days, I found out, are modular units (notice no cables sticking out the opposite end). This power supply came with a pouch full of different cable arrangements. You only attach those cables you need minimizing the number of cables in your case. This is a sweet setup!

Next up was the motherboard, although it shouldn’t have been. The processor heat-sink has a base on it that attaches to the underside of the motherboard. I was unaware of this at the time.

Here’s a shot of the i5-750 processor still in its plastic protective cover. It still amazes me how small these things are.

To install the processor the “load plate” needs to be opened and the protective cover removed to reveal the socket on the motherboard.

With the processor in place on the socket, the load plate is lowered and locked into position.

Next in went the video card.

So here’s where I realized I needed to pull the motherboard back out to install the base of the processor heat-sink. Here’s a shot of the bottom of the motherboard with the heat-sink base installed.

And the motherboard reinstalled in the case with the processor heat-sink retention mechanisms attached to the base (the curved metal pieces on either side of the processor)

Now I could reinstall the components I had to remove and move on…

Next in went the processor heat-sink. A very small dab of thermal paste gets applied between the processor and the heat-sink to ensure heat transfer from the processor to the heat-sink. To dissipate heat the heat-sink contains 8 heat pipes to transfer heat generated by the processor to a stack of multiple thin plates. Transferring air between these plates to remove the heat will be the job of 2 fans that will eventually be attached to either side of this thing.

After installing the fans on the processor heat-sink (one is visible in the pic below, the other is on the opposite side of the heat-sink) I became worried the memory modules may not fit. They just barely clear the heat-sink fan. Unfortunately it does not appear I will be able to use the remaining memory slots with this fan in place should I decide to add memory in the future.

The TV Tuner card will reside in the last expansion slot so it’s placement at this time is not crucial. I went ahead and got started on installing the mess of cables. It always looks so clean until you start installing cables!

The TV Tuner card was not necessary for first boot so I’ll hold off on installing it until later. My experience has shown its best to start with the bare minimum and work up from there.

I was now ready for the first boot of the system. I went back over the cable connections to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I left the storage hard drive disconnected since its not necessary at this time, and left the network cable disconnected for the same reason. All systems go… press the button!

Boot up went well, although one thing became pretty apparent… the video card fan was a little loud for my taste (more about that later). After getting some fan issues worked out in the BIOS, and some LED issues due to mis-labeled cables worked out, it was time to install Windows 7. In went the CD and I must say this was the easiest operating system to load that I’ve experienced (I only have XP & ME to compare it to though)

After Windows was installed I connected the network cable and let Windows update do its thing. With Windows fully updated I attached the second hard drive, and then finally installed the TV Tuner card. This card has two coaxial inputs (one for TV signals, and one for FM Stereo). Even though the card only has a single TV signal connector it contains two TV tuners, each capable of decoding either analog or digital TV including full HD. This is the same type of tuner typical flat screen TV’s come with, except there are two on this card. The card also comes with a remote and a separate piece that installs in an adjacent slot for additional external cable hookups such as S-video and component connections. I don’t think I’ll need it, but I’m installing anyway so I won’t have to do it later should I need it. (sorry… no pic of my install, but here’s one from their website)

Ok, back to that video card sound issue I mentioned… Angela & I both noticed the PC was a little louder than we liked. The video card I chose was a compromise between a well performing gaming card, and something that would be quiet. The Gigabyte card advertised a Zalman heat-sink and cooler that was targeted at the HTPC market… Zalman is known for quiet cooling solutions so this card seemed ideal. Unfortunately for our tastes it wasn’t! The card performs well, it’s just too loud.

My first attempt at a solution was to remove the fan from the card and build a duct to channel air from one of the internal case fans over the video card heat-sink. Here’s a shot of the duct I built with the side panel removed so you can see the relation to the heat-sink. The fan is the cream-colored piece on the right. The idea was to channel the air from this 140mm fan down to a narrow area just big enough to fit the heat-sink. This hopefully would provide adequate air-flow to keep the card cool.

After completing the duct and firing the PC back up, it was apparent our quietness goal had been met but the temperature monitoring program showed the card was not being kept cool enough (this is a HOT running card!)… ugh! Another solution was needed.

I finally settled on an Artic Cooling Twin Turbo Pro aftermarket VGA cooler (picture from their website below). All I can say is this thing ROCKS. Even though it’s got 2 fans, they’re way-bigger than the single fan I removed. 2 fans, each bigger than the single fan I removed, easily move more air while turning much less RPMs resulting in much quieter operation. Now that I’ve got it dialed in, GPU temperatures are no longer an issue!

Satisfied with the setup of the PC it was time to reinstall all the home theater components. Pictured below are, from top to bottom, a Pioneer VSX-1019AH-k Audio/Video Multi-Channel Receiver (the orange thing sticking out the front is a 32GB USB drive that stores all of our music on it. Although we technically don’t need this any longer since we can store all of our music on the HTPC, we’re keeping it so the stereo may be used independently of the PC if desired), a Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-Ray Disk Player (this was purchased a while back due to it’s linking capabilities with our Panasonic flat-screen plasma), and finally the HTPC.

I wired each of the components above along with the TV to operate either independently, or all together. This means the TV may be turned on by itself without the stereo or HTPC. The stereo may be turned on by itself without the TV or HTPC. TV and/or FM signals may be recorded on the HTPC without ever having to turn on the stereo or TV. Or everything may be used together.

So, what will the new HTPC do? Although I’m still exploring, here are the basics…

1st and foremost, we can record TV in full HD quality. I purchased Windows 7 for the new & improved Media Center. Using the remote that came with the TV Tuner card, I can control what’s on TV, set up shows to record, pull up a TV schedule (provided by Microsoft as part of the Windows 7 package. It uses your internet connection, but unlike cable companies, it’s free), have access to “internet TV” (provided by Microsoft I believe), etc...

Here’s a shot showing the Media Center Menu pulled up while PGA golf is playing on the TV.

Since watching TV is simply an application running, other applications may be opened simultaneously. Want to look something up on the internet while watching TV without having to fire up the laptop? No problem!