Nettop ION HTPC build

[rob4001]

Hi

Just wanted some advice on HTPC build with new dual core Atom and ION. Budget £300

Cheers

[aidanjt]

How about an off-the-shelf solution?

[Pob255]

Well all told you'll be pressed to beat the ASRock syastem for price
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asroc...320GB-HDD-HDMI

but the Zotac IONITX-D-E is the main recomended motherboard+cpu combo
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ZOTAC...30)-IONITX-D-E

[oolon]

I think the POV/ION330 is a much better board, as it has a full 16x PCIe slot gen 2 slot in it where as the ZOTAC board does not. £119

Case I got a Joujye528 for £59 and the HD cage £7.50 as it comes with some gromits which mean you can mount drives vertically to the front of the case. Why this case? Because it has a built in PSU a monster at 220W, and can take a low-profile card vertically or a full height card horizontally.

Crucial 4GB (2X2GB KIT) 200-PIN DDR2 PC2-6400 SODIMM £41.26
Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black 7200RPM SATA 16MB £58.66 You might want a bigger slower drive, lots to pick from.

If you don't want a card in it you can put an optical drive in it.

I also put a 60mm fan it in which is nice an quiet and as much as it needs.

Total £285.42 but your spend the rest on delivery.

This will put you over budget however I got a second hard drive and one of these StarTech.com Dual 2.5 3.5 SATA HDD Adapter £12.99 this was so I could do a mirrored pair of drives this allowed me to stack to together with just enough clearance for the board (2mm). I did not use the whole adapter just the riser sections.

Mine takes between 43-50W to run however I have two drives and a Sangoma Technologies Corp. A200/Remora FXO/FXS Analog AFT card in it. Thats a lower power use than my monitor!

[staffsMike]

Great tips there oolon, sounds like a very tasty build. Shame that case is so pig ugly but it's very functional none the less

[oolon]

Great tips there oolon, sounds like a very tasty build. Shame that case is so pig ugly but it's very functional none the less

Your right looks is something I didn't care too much about in this build as it was for a little firewall, I wanted the smallest footprint with one expansion slot. I have a Lian-Li PC-C37 Muse HTPC case for a machine I have yet to build which is a much better looker however this rather expensive, also it supports matx boards, so putting in a mitx board would be a bit of a waste of the room it has. I have set to so an matx ion/atom board, which is a shame because the chipset has a lot of PCIe lanes.

[scottxxx]

I've just bought the bits for my new HTPC/Server PC, coming to around £235 so far.

That's got me a Jetway J9F2-Extreme motherboard with 1.66GHz Core2Duo Mobile CPU (~45W under load) and 2x1GB of Corsair RAM (£140 inc. delivery). Has a CF slot too, so I can use solid state for the OS (silent) and then have the hard drive power up when required for access to media.

Bought this case ~£40 delivered. It'll take a 3.5" drive and a standard DVD, making it the same size as the Shuttle XPC its replacing. If you're not too bothered about the absolute smallest size, I'd get something like this as you can use standard PC components instead of laptop drives and save quite a bit. I've read there could be trouble fitting some Zotac/POV boards however, so may require a bit of digging around first.

For the price of a 500GB 2.5" drive you just about get a 1TB 3.5" drive, so double the GB/£££. The Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB is quiet and low power, and under £52 from Scan on Today Only.

Don't need a DVD-RW yet, but could add a BluRay drive when they come down in price. All I need now is a wireless keyboard with trackpad (~£25) and I'm set.

Seems like a powerful and (hopefully when its assembled) quiet system to me, just slightly bigger than your average Atom prebuild. An Atom 330 ION motherboard will cost about the same as I've paid for my Core2Duo board, so the total is around £250 but with a 1TB drive instead of a 320GB one like the ASRock ION has, and its more flexible when you need to upgrade. Of course, that depends on the board fitting in the case, but sounds like a good option to get a good system for the money.

[Pob255]

@ Scottxxx, yes however the Jetway J9F2-Extreme is a intel 945 chipset so uses GMA950 for the graphics, which is fine for desktop, but anything more advanced and it leans heavly on the cpu.

Which is what make the ION so good, it has the graphical power not to need to lean on the cpu.
You'd probably be better off looking at one of the AM2 boards with ether the nvidia 8200 or amd 780g, while neather are as good as the ION graphically they are still decent.

However the OP asked for ION


@oolon
Nice motherboard
Intresting that they've squeezed a pci-e x16 on there, although it lacks the wireless (could be sorted with a USB wireless stick) and SODIMM memory is more expensive than standard.
Depends on what the OP is looking for in his system as to how important these factors are.

I like the Jou Jye NU-528i-B case, I don't think it's that ugly, but not the prettiest ether (looks like an HP case) and it's specs with that psu look good.

[rob4001]

Are there any other ION boards that have a PCI slot for Freeview/Freesat capable card?

[oolon]

Are there any other ION boards that have a PCI slot for Freeview/Freesat capable card?

Point of view do one the POV/ION330-1.