What makes a htpc

But that was six years ago. Fast forward to where, thanks to massive improvements to processor speed and size, there are now myriad options for those wanting small PCs for their home theater setup. HTPCs are by no means new, but the fact that you can get a powerful PC that's the size of an Xbox One S and twice as powerful in your living room is awesome and something that not enough media enthusiasts take advantage of.

Imagine browsing the web in your living room with a physical mouse and keyboard trust me, it's much faster and more efficient than using an Apple TV , playing your favorite video game on the largest screen in your house or creating a library of hundreds of movies and being able to stream them to any of your devices whenever and wherever you are using software like PLEX. HTPCs, honestly, are just as important to your home entertainment setup as your TV and cable box — and thankfully setting one up is easier than ever before.

This guide is living proof. HTPCs now come in all sorts of form factors and can be the size of a gaming consoles, or they can be as tiny as an Apple TV. Over the last few years HTPCs have not only gotten smaller, but also cheaper, too.

They can be purchased — or built — at all different price points to accommodate your wants and needs. Because I am at my sofa rather than my desk, I use a cordless Logitech keyboard and trackball rather than a mouse, and I have a video monitor on the desk facing the sofa so I can do office tasks while it sends video signal and sound to my receiver and TV.

People who find TV and films this way learn it is so much more unrestricted than other entertainment options. There might be a short learning curve for many people, and they might need to ask for help from people online who have more experience. Signal, picture quality, and audio quality are superb, and exceed what you will get with easier media consumption devices.

I appreciate that Jake Morrison took the time to write an article about this topic to help normalize this experience, which so many people are unaware exists as a home entertainment option. It changed my life, literally HTPC did a little bit. Your email address will not be published.

Skip to content Hardware 3. Does the HTPC still have a place? March 5, at Woo Park says:. Therefore, to play 4K videos perfectly, it's recommended to decode videos with GPU hardware decoding.

Then, what CPU can decode p and 4K videos? To decode p videos, the CPU should support H. The Kaby Lake is seventh generation Core microprocessor. But it is better that the system hard drive is an SSD. Which one to use for your PC? Choosing a right motherboard is very important because it determines the HTPC size to some extent and determines what ports and how many ports you can have. In addition, when you choose motherboards, please make sure the motherboard offers all ports you want and it is compatible with other components.

If you want to upgrade the HTPC later, you should also make sure the motherboard can support hardware that's better than what you use now. Fans are the main source of noise. They will also take a lot of space in the HTPC. Therefore, many people may recommend you to use fewer fans in HTPC build.

But you should be aware that less fans means lower heat dissipation ability. For example, you should consider whether you need a dedicated sound card and internal optical drive bay. Some people may remove optical disk drive bay from their HTPCs to save room. How to check PC specs Windows 10? Do you have determined what hardware you should use? If you still have no idea about that, you can refer to other people's configuration. The above configuration is offered by a netizen named mlknez.

As mentioned, AMD models have recently become much more popular than they used to be. It takes a lot of processing power to decode a compressed p HD video. In software-based decoding the processor does all of the weight lifting, so you need to have a powerful enough CPU.

Intel Core i3 is a great choice to decode p HD video. If you need more powerful graphics for playing games, I would recommend getting a low powered discrete graphics card. GeForce GTX works well for most games. A form factor means the physical dimensions of a system. In practice, the motherboard form factor defines the size of the case you can use.

They are louder than the larger ones used in micro ATX cases. A larger case also means that you can have better airflow and room for more hard drives and other peripherals. Keep in mind that the performance of a motherboard depends mainly on the chipset, not the manufacturer. A solid state drive can help you shave off several watts per hard drive which means less heat and noise.

An SSD will make your user interface feel snappier, for example by helping with the loading of p fanarts and other metadata. As an additional benefit, your system will boot and shut down much faster, and the system will just feel much snappier overall. The key to building a quiet HTPC is to use low power parts. There is no rush to build your HTPC.

Take your time to carefully research components to make sure they are all compatible with each other. It did not fit inside my case because it was slightly higher than regular cards due to its passive cooling solution.