Confessions of a Serial HTPC Builder - Part 3

13. In Use

Well the moment of truth had arrived. My new HTPC was finished, and it was time to check to see if I had managed to create HTPC perfection. At the beginning of this article I listed four guidelines to which I wanted to adhere with this build.

HTPC Priorities:

Quiet: I powered the computer on and was immediately transported to a Zen state of blissful silence. While the HTPC was not completely dead silent, I was overjoyed to find that if I moved back about three feet I could barely hear it at all in a quiet room. With the TV on sitting about five feet away there was not a whisper of disruption from the HTPC. It was a resounding success.

The thick steel case acted as an excellent sound barrier to mask the small amount of sound coming from a total of four fans. Two 80 mm low RPM exhaust fans, a 92 mm CPU fan and an 80 mm fan in the power supply. Everything else was passively cooled. I personally don't see any need to eliminate fans completely from an HTPC. As long as you're conservative about the type and quantity of fans that you chose to put in the case, respectable noise levels can be achieved. The point is not to eliminate noise altogether, but rather to reduce noise enough to that it is easy to ignore.

Cool: After installing Windows, I threw on Gigabyte's CPU temperature monitoring tool and was happy to see that I was idling at about 80.5° F (27° C). Under a heavy and prolonged load the CPU temperature did not ever exceed 104° F (40° C). Unless I was encoding video, the CPU temperature usually stayed between 85°-95° F (about 30°-35° C) Perfect! Praise Zalman! Nearly noiseless operation and respectable temperature!

Powerful: For the first time in this series I was using TV tuner hardware that is compatible with the Intel Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool and I'm pleased to report that this time I was finally able to get all of the DHCAT tests to run. With an overall score of 160, my new HTPC definitely outperformed the previous two by a significant amount.

The DHCAT, was written by Intel and is surely designed with Intel processors in mind, so I assume that a Pentium processor would receive a higher score. My AMD processor generally appears to lose steam when performing more than two tasks at once. I find that in real-world use I rarely bother to encode video while I record TV or watch movies so the deficiency with multitasking doesn't affect me too much. Generally, I'll let the HTPC encode video at night while I sleep.

Overall DHCAT score

DHCAT details

DHCAT details legend

I take the results of this particular test with a grain of salt. The results were interesting to study and compare to my other systems, but I believe that an HTPC should not be the most powerful PC in your house. A system built for pure unbridled power would surely succeed in receiving a higher score from the DHCAT, but it would do so at the cost of cool and quiet operation. The machine that I built is definitely powerful enough for my home theater needs. If you want the full DHCAT report, you can download it here (PDF file).

I also ran PCMark on the system and achieved a score about 7% higher than my Mega 180 based system.

PC Mark score

Appropriate for a home theater: The Silverstone case was a study in perfection. For the first time I had an HTPC that really looked as if it belonged in my home theater. Combined with the quiet operation, I doubt that I could have built a better looking or more functional HTPC.

If you want the full DHCAT report, you can download it here (PDF file).