HTPC 4-Way Enclosure Roundup

Anony writes "Anandtech's Joshua Buss takes a look at four horizontal HTPC enclosures. He writes, "With the amazing rate at which full-fledged computers are dropping in price, it's really no wonder why they're starting to take over more and more roles that used to be accomplished by simpler machines. For everything from car stereo systems to hold massive music collections to kitchen machines for helping retrieve and store recipes, these "specialized" computer uses seem to only be expanding in number...Luckily, there have been many improvements made in this category since the inception of the HTPC, and as such, we were able to round up four very nice looking enclosures to compare in this article. Every unit is advertised as being able to handle a full ATX motherboard, and since the demands for a powerful HTPC are relatively high, we'll be giving these cases' cooling systems a vigorous workout with a brand new 3 gigahertz Pentium 4-based ATX test bed."

Comments

Why a 3GHz Pentium?

[mark2003]

Wouldn't a low power Pentium M be more sensible - otherwise the fans will drown out my TV and the cost of the power would bankrupt me.

Why do we always assume we need a high end generalist device for a specific usage that could be satisfied with a lower power and cheaper alternative?

Re:Why a 3GHz Pentium?

[Anonymous Coward]

The P-M may consume little power but they're pretty expensive. The motherboard selection is also much smaller than for the P-4. The best bang for the buck at the moment is probably a low end (3000+) 90nm Athlon 64 on a socket 939 board with a GeForce 6100 chipset. They're cheaper and consume far less power than the P-4. One or two years down the line you can just swap out the CPU for an Athlon X2 4800+ when they become affordable.

Re:Why a 3GHz Pentium?

[Spooon69]

A fast CPU is required if you want optimal image quality with resizing/noise-reduction/sharpening filters (e.g. piping your video through ffdshow for instance). Unless you own a DVD player that costs a few/several grand, an htpc is a good solution that costs much less and does much more.

And no, you can't enable "Hardware Acceleration" (to reduce cpu usage) in your video card for mpeg2 video (e.g. DVDs) and still pipe your video through a software post-processor, it's either one or the other. So a fast cpu is required.

Here is a good beginner's guide to what I'm talking about:
http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=ffdshowdvd_1

DVDs honestly look a lot better and going back to "regular" dvd video is a big let down that's very noticable.

Re:Why a 3GHz Pentium?

[Hast]

The frontend needs to be powerful if you want to decode HDTV. 1080p requires a really good CPU/GPU combo to playback without framedrops.

The reason you would want a backend with CPU power instead of hardware encoders is because software encoders are typically higher quality. It's hard to do multi-pass encoding and similar if you are recording real-time.

Naturally these don't apply to everyone, but there are reasons for getting a high powered HTPC.

Re:Mini / Pico ITX much nicer

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I guess really what Im saying is I would perfer a Mac Mini :o)

The Mini is a nice box, but it's not an HTPC box, despite what Slashdot users want to think.

Things you might want in an HTPC that the Mini doesn't have:

• Lots of disk space. TV, ripped DVDs, and music all take up space. Notebook drives aren't going to cut it, and your only option for adding drives to the Mini is to buy external FireWire drives/enclosures - another added expense.
• Multichannel / Digital audio. I'm sure that there is some USB gadget that you can buy, but, again, we're talking more gizmos sticking off the back of the Mini and more added expense. Lots of PC motherboards have optical/multichannel audio, ora decent PCI sound card (e.g. Audigy 2) runs around $40.
• Component video. If you have a TV that will accept a DVI input, you're lucky. Most TVs won't accept DVI, and they only accept the encrypted DRM variant of HDMI. That leaves component output - which is available on many different video cards, often for less than $60.
• A TV tuner. Sure, there are USB and FireWire solutions, but it's another thing sticking off the back. And more money - PCI tuners with MPEG-2 encoding run less than $70
• 
  
  So, yeah, if you get a Mini and add:
  - FireWire disk
  - USB Optical Audio adaptor
  - USB TV tuner
  - USB IR reciever
  - A USB 2.0 hub (only 2 ports on the Mini)
  
  Then you may have an HTPC. All you need to do now is piece together an integrated solution to browse your media on the TV.