Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners greenhorn builds an htpc

I've been wanting to build an htpc for quite a while now and the time seems to be near. I've never built a pc before but have replaced hdds, reinstalled xp from zero once, replaced a ps, and added a card.
I want to eventually setup an unraid server but for now I just want a healthy htpc.
What I would like this thing to do-
1. Rip my dvd's (mostly tv-on-dvd) to hdd's and watch from there to lose all the bs on the discs. I currently run decrypter/anydvd on my dinosaur e-machine.
2. record analog AV from a few laserdiscs that wont be released on dvd anytime soon, as well as some vhs recordings.
3 digitize my LP collection. I still have my tt and 2ch pre.
edit- 3a. I also want to rip about 800 cd's to flac and be able to play them, as well as encode to mp3 with LAME for the ipod.
4 I might watch some tv if I had dvr functionality but this is not a priority.

I have a 27"crt sd tv. An hd display is not planned anytime soon but you never know.
I also have a mch pre with DD/dts and coax,toslink, and mch analog inputs.
I just recieved my case and I have a haugpauge pvr 150mce in a drawer if i can use it.
Still undecided on sound card.
I plan on several TB's of hdd storage.

I've spent way too much time on avs and newegg and the following is what I've come up with. Feel free to point and laugh, but when you're done I'd like to know your opinins.

my proposed system
I need the card for s-video out.

My cheaper alternative is here
MB has s-video so no need for a video card.

I'm thinking MCE for the OS but have read good things about vista for this kind of application.

geez that was long. Thanks for reading it.

Hey duckman,

Your link it's working for me, I have a newegg account and it's taking me to my wishlist, not sure if I'm doing something wrong. You might have to make it a "public" wish list. I'm definitely willing to take a look for you.

One thing I will say, from personal experience, is that the hauppauge 150 does not play nicely with Vista. I'm not sure if it's only the 64 bit version, but hauppauge hasn't done a good job of updating their drivers on the older cards. If you do decide to go with Vista (and there's no reason you shouldn't) a 1600 or 1800 from hauppauge will work like a charm.

OK, made the wishlists public, lets try this again.

proposed system

cheaper alternative

Hope these work.

Your first choice is the mobo I wanted when I did my build at Christmas.

I am quite happy with my M69G, but it won't handle Bluray when drives finally become reasonable in price.

The only thing I wonder about with this series is if they will allow hdmi audio passthrough so the reciever can do HD decoding. I didn't look at the details on the MA78 to see if it decodes the new HD audio specs.

I can see getting this board as a way to future proof, but if you have no plans for an HD display in the next year or so, I would save the $ and pick up the M69. At the rate things are evolving, you will be able to upgrade to a better board in a year or two anyway.

Your power supply is overkill. I did the calculations on the M69 and it showed that I wouldn't need more than 240W unless you add a power hungry video card. I ended up with a 400w rebadged seasonic and I thought that was overkill. It was cheaper than the 380w Seasonic. Its a great power supply and is VERY quiet compared to anything I have ever owned. I liked the way they wrapped the cabling as well.

Unless you plan on gaming, you don't need the faster memory either. I don't know much about Adata memory. I ended up with 2 gig of Kinston at close to what you paid for the Adata because that was what was avilable locally.

Nice case. My stuff is in an old ATX case because I can't dedice what I want yet.

I was all set to just copy a system built by a guy on avs using the 69 and the a-data, then the processor he used was deactivated right off my wish list, which got me looking around. So then I robbed the combo with the 78 from a review site.
I thought the ps might be a little much. I had read good things about seasonic and was thinking efficiency when I found that. I'm having trouble finding pwr usage #s for the various combonents. The thing that concerns me is having enough PS if I load the case up with 6 big-ass hdd's over time.
I'm hoping to move this MB-ram-proc. to an unraid box when I upgrade next.
I'm really just kind of stumbling around trying to learn as I go.

I'm impressed with the case, it's heavier than I expected. There were reports of broken drive doors on arrival but mine was fine

No worries here the passthrough/amp feature is at the receiver/pre-amp. Your video will be routed to the display while the audio is processed in your receiver/pre-amp!

As for the decoding I don't believe this onboard audio decodes the HD audio just DTS and DD but your HT receiver/pre-amp can if it has this feature...if not then you'll have to get an upgrade!

I recently built a HTPC using an ASUS board with an AMD cpu. I tried your "cheap system" alternative MB and traded it in for the ASUS M2A-VM HDMI as it had many problems with audio and some video issues as well. Unfortuneatly the ASUS board had the exact same problems (same chipsets in both boards). After fiddling with it for a month got it working. Not a perfect solution but workable. I also used the haugpauge pvr 150mce card with good results for playback...didn't care for the recording (tv) ability. Not that it was unwatchable just VCR quality at best...I could download the shows in AVI format that looked far superior...but shouldn't be a problem with your sd TV. I'd question getting the video card at this point your onboard will be enough until you upgrade your display!

I used Vista Ult. for the MCE part and with some tweaking to get different formats to play I'd have to say it was a good choice for OS....just get MCEtool to make it behave!

As for the rest of your system choices as long as the hardware behaves together you should have no problems

I don't follow you. There needs to be some way to tell the o/s where to send the audio data stream. From what I could learn a few months ago, there was no way to do this with the MA96. The default was for the o/s to pass the audio stream to its decoder and to downsample it to 16 bit. I didn't quite understand audio handling before I bought this board.

Its the only real dissapointment I have had. It upsamples dvds to 1080p very well. Good enough that I never bothered with software upsampling that could be tweeked to improve picture qulaity.

I planned on getting a video card to do HD video formats. With the sound issue, I may end up replacing the mobo.

How good the M69 is depends on what you are doing. If it dosn't involve HD audio or video, I think its a great board.

I made an oops! I thought you were talking about the signal after it left the pc.

The only way to get past this problem is to get a better audio card! A dedicated audio card will be far superior to an onboard solution. While you don't have the option on a single cable HDMI you do get great sound!

Sorry for the misunderstanding.