New to the HTPC need suggestions on most things

ok I am totally new to the HTPC but I will give you a list of what I have so far and would like some suggestions\ ideas abnd any other constructive criticism.
Part I have so far
CPU= AMD athlon 64x2 3800, Mother board= MSI K9N6PGM2-V AM2 GF6100 RT
TV card= HVR -1600 ( have remote and ir thing,
Ram= 4x1gb sticks DDR2- 800 ( not sure if I would need them all )
case = something laying around
for Video card I have two choices; Asus 7900 GT or a HIS IceQ3 HD 3870
I also have a Xonar DX sound card but I am not sure if it still works.
that is all the parts that I have for now I also not sure which Operating system and other software to use.
I am not sure if this is relavent but just in case it is I Live in Canada

 

Sounds good. Honestly it is overkill for a HTPC.

The best advice I can give you is to make sure you know what you are doing with regards to the video card. If you ever plan on watching bluray movies, you need to plan for HDCP support from your video card. HDCP is the new copy protection from bluray, and if you don't have HDCP support, you can't output your bluray to a TV or monitor via your video card without special software like AnyDVD. Also, having HDCP on the video card takes a lot of the workload away from the CPU, but that shouldn't be an issue since you have a powerful CPU. You basically have to decide if you want a more powerful/expensive graphics card to play games with, or if you want a cheaper/more efficient video card to handle HD content.

I run an HTPC with lots of downloaded HD content and lots of blurays from Netflix, and my 3Ghz P4 with 1GB DDR RAM works just fine. By the way, I run WinXP SP3 on my HTPC and it works well.

Good luck getting your HTPC

 

thank you for reply this is just basically going to be for movies and television tv show recording all the gaming I do is PC gaming and I have a PC for that .

 

Your setup should be just fine. I would go with the cheapest video card (within reason) that had HDCP support.

I personally have a Radeon 2600 XT 512MB, which is (was) one of the best HDCP video cards out there. Of course I haven't done video card research for a year or two, so that may have changed.

Of course you could probably even use onboard video, to tell you the truth. When I first added a bluray player to my HTPC, I didn't have the 2600 XT video card and blurays were too choppy due to the workload on my puny 3Ghz P4. Even overclocked to 3.6Ghz didn't work. However, adding a video card that handled HDCP on the GPU made my CPU usage go down from 100% during bluray playback to approximately 30%. The only difference between the 2600 XT and my previous video card was HDCP built-in; the RAM speed and GPU speed were the same as my old card. With a 3.8Ghz dual core CPU, I don't see that being a problem, though. Your CPU use will be higher without HDCP, but I bet your computer could handle it. It's really your call. You might want to try without the HDCP video card first, and use just whatever is lying around (as long as it has a DVI output).

What are you planning for with regards to your sound setup? Do you have a surround sound receiver? Or are you just planning on stereo sound?

 

how do I find out if a Video card has HDCP support?
I have an old receiver that has Dolby digital but I usually am using stereo head phones anyway

 

The cards that have HDCP support are generally marketed as such. It's sort of a rare feature still, I think. So you have to seek out video cards that support it. There really is no easy way to find out, other than if you can find a list on the internet that somebody else has put together.

However, the program AnyDVD, which definitely should be on any HTPC, disables HDCP restrictions. These restrictions include not being able to output via analog display such as VGA or component, so no normal computer monitor or component-only TV would work. It's pretty draconian, archaic stuff, and it really sucks. The program also does stuff like allowing you to skip ads/warnings, etc.

It is so easy and cheap to get surround sound set up on an HTPC that I definitely recommend it. There are two ways you can do this, the correct, easy, higher quality, and more expensive way and the cheap, jerry-rigged way that I personally do it.

You can either connect your sound card/mobo's SPDIF/coax cable to your receiver directly and then just route video via DVI --> HDMI on the TV. This is the correct way.

There is another way, too, in case you don't have a receiver that supports SPDIF, etc. The way I do it is I have an all-analog PC surround sound receiver with no on-board decoder. It has RCA inputs for each of the 5.1 speakers. I output a different speaker channel through different headphone jacks on the sound card, then use a headphone jack to RCA cable adapter and do my surround sound this way. These PC surround systems cost about $100, I believe. I already had one around, so it's the way that I did it.

 

I didn't know that any dvd removed all of that I should check that out

 

Cool. I would definitely consider it a must-have for any HTPC that is going to be playing any physical media at all.

It also has features allowing you to rip discs (including bluray) and stuff and all sorts of other little things, too.

By the way, are you going to get a bluray drive for your HTPC? You get quality from bluray discs that you really cannot find anywhere else, so I recommend it if you want to get the most out of your HDTV. You can get bluray drives for the PC for about $100 now, I think. I bought mine as a bargain at $200 about 2 years ago, and it was a great buy.

I also recommend you get PowerDVD software to play the bluray discs, if you go that route. It's the only software that takes advantage of video cards that have GPU-powered HDCP, so even if you get an HDCP video card it won't matter unless you use PowerDVD. I recommend version 8, as it's the problem that I've been able to play all of my bluray discs unhindered. With other versions, namely 7 and 9 (current version), some discs wouldn't play, or would give errors due to new updates that were necessary to be applied, etc, and screw things up. Only version 8 has always been good to me.

One more thing that I just thought of is that if you don't have a good quality TV that features one of 24, 48 or 120 Hz mode or, if not that, at least really good 3:2 pulldown detection, then you should really look for a video card that has good 3:2 pulldown detection enhancements. This is a feature in ATI's HDCP video cards, such as the 2600 XT that I have.

Of course if you never plan on playing DVDs or blurays in your HTPC, and only playing downloaded content, then all of these points about video cards and HDCP and 3:2 pulldown detection are moot because compressed videos from the internet will probably already have these things stripped or changed anyway.

 

You motherboard will be limited as far as adding more tuner cards. When I built my HTPC that's my main concern. The more PCI slots the better, the current one I have has 5 PCI slots. My HTPC has 4 tuner cards installed (record 4 shows at one time), 1 tuner card is too limiting for a HTPC.

Your tuner card HVR1600 is a good brand I use the PVR150 (older model), it has the built-in mpeg hardware encoders (very important on any HTPC). These hardware encoders allow you to record in the background and watch a bluray movie at the same time.

RAM isn't that important on a HTPC, I've ran some with 512mb, my current HTPC has 2gb of ram. 4gb will be more than enough. Onboard sound is all I use.

Video card is also an item that doesn't need to be highend. My current HTPC is using the onboard graphics (I don't have any bluray or use it to play games). I do have a radeon 4350 (cost 39.95) on my game machine, it has vga/dvi/HDMI outputs, it also only consumes 40 watts.

It would also be a good idea to have a seperate hard drive just for your video recordings, at least a 750gb formatted NTFS and using the 64kb clusters (not the default 4kb) The 64kb clusters will give better playback of video files. My HTPC has 4 hard drives (1 bootdrive, 3 storage drives). Make sure all the hard drives have fans blowing on them.

Make sure you have a decent power supply, I have a "WORKS" 400 watt, this has work great on my HTPC which is running 24/7 nonstop for months at a time. I've had 2 generic power supplies fail on me, not good for a always on computer. I also have UPS always connected to the HTPC.

I use sagetv as my media software, (OS windows xp sp2) it has worked great for me for the past 3 years. You just need to find a similar software that will work in your region.

 

I pretty much download most of my TV episodes so I am doubting that I need any more tv tuners. this is just for TV and the odd Movie, all of my Gaming is or will be done on my gaming PC. So this is just for TV things maybe later on I will upgrade. as it is the TV I am using is an older one 26" that only has the s video and rca jacks. one day I will be getting a newer one around the same size but as of right now I don't have the money to fork out 400-1000 CAD lol