Let's Build an HTPC!

W that's uh that's how it looked when I woke up this morning we're just going to stick with it in this video we are building an htpc we haven't tackled one of those in a good while and I've got the perfect case for it I want to walk you through step by step how we assemble this and also talk about my parts choices because uh well there are a lot of different htpcs out there now the acronym stands for home theater personal computer although it's not really personal if it's in a home theater environment ideally accessible by the masses and say a living room connected to a TV a traditional htpc would allow you to consume media like physical media so DVDs Blu-rays you'd have an optical drive more than likely and you could also listen to music from it maybe if you have like a very beefy sound system downstairs this is what that would be hooked up to though gaming was kind of an afterthought there were some folks who tried to do it the issue is that TVs back then didn't really have gaming capabilities I mean yeah you could run games from them but they had typically awful input lag they couldn't really jump above 60 HZ interpolation and all that stuff was just pretty bad back then now you have oleds today that can run 12 HZ or higher and even traditional LCDs have gotten a lot better in the gaming category so the htpc mindset has somewhat shifted I wanted to address that because I'm sure some Old-Timers are thinking Greg this is not an htpc where is the optical drive we we don't use DVDs anymore very rarely do I ever need an optical drive for anything so we're going to build this htpc for the purposes of Gaming and VR because that's what entertains my family and I'm assuming that's what entertains many of yours as well and we've the perfect case for one now I like my htpcs to look somewhat like receivers I just think they blend in nicely if they kind of Follow That traditional look and this Silverstone case is no exception um it is actually a a case that you're supposed to lay down flat so I have it sitting upright but it's really supposed to lay like this and look more like a VCR or like I said a receiver so when you put this in the entertainment setup in say your living room it just just yeah it looks more subdued it doesn't look like an obvious gaming PC which I quite like it's stealthy so we're going to build a system in this thing I think it's going to be a different enough build that uh it might Intrigue you it again is not going to be flash sheet it's not going to have RGB there's no need for really any of that it might have some lights but we're not going to be able to see them because this case is designed to again look less flashy and more business casual I think you'll enjoy it because it is going to be a different style of build and at the end maybe we'll see how it performs as well in some games are you ready stay with me if you're building a gaming PC just like we are and you're planning to install Windows you might be thinking about how you're going to activate it I can't stand that pesky Windows activation Watermark so I use vipd key to get rid of it to get started click one of the links below that correspond to your version of Windows there are several to choose from including Windows 10 Pro Windows 10 home and even Windows 11 variants when you found your applicable version click buy now I always like to pay via Paypal safe and secure and this part's super important at checkout be sure to use my offer code gsvp for a 30% discount during vipd Keys Christmas sale that'll bring Windows 10 home down to $14 Windows 10 Pro to 15 and windows 11 Pro to 21 huge savings over retail for a key that essentially does the same thing once it's finished processing you want to click the user center button and then click on the purchase you just made then click get key this is what you use in the activation tab of your operating system to fully activate it and we'll show you how to do that later in the video vipd is running their Christmas sale only for a limited time so be sure to click one of the links below to get started today and don't forget our special offer code gsvp for That Sweet discount this here is the Silverstone grandia 11 interesting name we're going to remove this uh side panel here so you can see the goodies well or lack thereof we'll have goodies in here eventually now we'll need to remove this structural bar not a problem to fill up screws this also though connects to this tray right here which is good for two 3 and a half in drives I think it sits uh I think it sits like that right there if I'm not mistaken but I've removed it because we're not going to use 3 and 1 half in drives what we will be using though is all of this an am5 platform we're going to stick with a ryzen 57600 which I know isn't like a cream of the crop or anything I don't want to just build PCS that are like using the highest End Hardware that's no fun I think we'll be just fine in this application with a 7600 worst case we'll upgrade down the line and I'll explain my reasoning the RTX 3080 was a tough choice it needed to be a card that had HDMI 2.1 support though because we'll be connecting this to a high refresh rate 4K display and I think HDMI 2.1 runs up to what is it um it's got to be 4K 144 if I'm not mistaken you can check bandwidth and things uh via a link in the description there's a video we put out that will talk about some of the resolution refresh rate limitations of different versions of HDMI and display port if you are wondering we've got our 240 mil AIO here from deepcool this is the LT 520 looks really nice but again we won't be able to see much of it in this Silverstone case 30 32 gigs of ddr5 2 terabyt of Corsair storage and a bp710 power supply we're not going overkill on the power supply no need to I think this unit is going to be just fine some of you might be questioning my cooler choice for this caliber CPU remember that this generation of ryzen architecture does run quite hot even the lower skews and I also want to make sure that we are isolating thermals from the CPU side from the remainder of the rig if possible since this system will be in a rather isolated closed off environment at the bottom of an entertainment setup so air flows not going to be phenomenal let's just say we'll start first with the platform of course I went with an a620 chipset this time around which I've never worked with before of course the A chipsets and amd's recent motherboard lineups are the cheapest or among the cheapest you can buy so it's going to have pretty stripped down feature sets and things again for an htpc I'm not all that worried about it it did save me some money because am5 boards by and large are still pretty expensive so we'll see I'll report back if it sucks but at least on paper it looked okay we get our CPU situated let's see here is it upright text this time around I think it is drop it in like so lower it down lower the arm we'll save this for later and then two sticks of DDR 5 also noticed so another byproduct of an A series chipset and some matx motherboards especially ITX you only get two dim slots not the end of the world is this is this backwards yeah it is backwards that is more like it so one stick there and another right next to it now you're probably wondering what this little uh plastic retaining clip is again another cheap alternative to screws or I don't know metal standoffs at the very least this is for our m.2 drive so we just plug this in here and it will sort of kind of mechanically fasten our nvme it's not terrible it gets the job done fastening some AIO mount mounting gear here's one more good look at the otherwise finished platform um not too much going on here especially without all the shrouds and things over the rear iio we take this bracket off and install the rear IO Shield of course it's not integrated on uh this cheaper motherboard and now in she goes nice and gently and yep standoffs line up like I said of course we could have fit an ATX motherboard in here but uh well there's some reasoning behind why I've chosen a smaller board we're going to fit some fans at the bot bom which will actually be the left side of the case when it's laying flat and that'll allow us to provide extra intake support for our graphics card which will have its fans of course facing down here toward the bottom uh we probably could weasel them in even if we had a fulls siize board but I just didn't want to risk any interference there I care more about air flow than I do expansion slots at this point I'm going to be removing these stock fans for two reasons for one obviously this is where our AO is going to go we're going to use our aio's included fans and for two these are only voltage controlled fans no pwm support not really a huge fan of this Silverstone and it's not like this case was all that cheap either I've got to say it looks pretty Sleek so far and now we've got to get this block situated right about here basic wiring is ready to go RGB header there connected we've got the pump connected the two fans for the uh for the AIO for the radiator I should say are connected there and then we're going to add two more again to feed the graphics card to connect to this Hub we've only got that one remaining Fan Hub on this board and that is it um interesting look interesting layout the tubes aren't that long so they kind of sit awkwardly above the block but again we're not going to see any of this so not super picky and unfortunately won't be able to connect this type-c cable there's uh nothing accommodating that on this motherboard we could buy some adapters but we're not going to get true type-c speeds we only have a single USB 3.0 header at that it's not a big deal there's only a single one of these we can still use the two USB type A ports power supply is up next we're going to do this fan side facing outward to isolate it from the remainder of the build also like that it's really small so it doesn't take up too much space in here now that it's fastened down we can finish most of our wiring we got two extra be quiet silent Wings four fans installed below and most cables are now connected we just need to Cable manage like a lot there's no space behind this motherboard tray by the way the way it's designed it's all supposed to be kind of here and so uh we're going to have to finesse some things a bit zip ties are definitely your best friend with this build okay that was uh that was kind of tough It's graphics card time this RTX 380 from gigabyte is a bit large but according to my rough math it should still barely fit oh my oh my this yeah this is is close this is closer than I thought it was going to be and I still got to move some cables out of the way holy cow we need to Route this stuff after we get the graphics card in just to be sure so it should sit wow that just barely fits I actually really like how tight this is but uh all around it it works it's almost like this graphics card was made for this chass you can see there's just just a little bit of clearance there between the top of this card and the radiator there I've got a bit of cable stuffed in front of this and most things are cleared out here next to the fans and the Shroud now you may have noticed I removed three PCI slot covers not two there's a good reason for that I've decided to add this PCI Wi-Fi card it also has Bluetooth built in now uh most of you are probably going to be wired but I think this is important for an htpc because if you want to use say wireless controllers and things you're going to probably either use dongles or something like this I use playst 4 controllers and they connect to my PC through things like this here to be clear I usually don't game on PC with a controller but when I'm downstairs in an htpc format where I might be gaming with friends maybe running emulators and the like it's nice to have controllers especially Wireless ones in we go carefully now it's going to sit just above our graphics card now we can reconnect this support bracket covers going on and here we are a top down view since this is how it'll sit in the the entertainment setup uh my office is really dirty ignore all that stuff in the background but this looks really good I'm actually really happy with the way this turned out it was a bit difficult to Cable manage kind of knew I was getting into that with this uh particular Silverstone htpc case but overall pretty satisfied especially when you take into account how large our graphics card is the fact we managed to still fit that we have a 240 mil AIO in here so I think cooling's going to be fine given where it's going to be situated we talked about this in previous videos with the uh the white height Revolt 3 case that we built-in and that was for the living room downstairs that build actually was pretty air flowy there wasn't a ton of restriction baked into the chassi itself but because of where we placed it it did run extremely hot which was again not the fault of the components more or less myself and where I wanted to put it in a stubborn sort of fashion this is going to be subjected to very similar uh restrictions when it comes to airf flow and so that's kind of why I wanted to shove as much cooling potential in here as I could with the dedicated fans for the graph gra card it's going to be pulling in air from the side that's going to be more or less fresh air I hope and again totally fresh air from the front that will heat the internals up a bit you'll notice I have four intake fans and no exhaust fans so we are kind of more or less just charging into this like positive pressure scenario where hopefully again I don't know for sure but hopefully a lot of that uh pent up air is going to be exhausted passively out the rear of the case where there are many perforations I did entertain the idea of swapping this power supply around where it have an intake fan essentially from the interior exhausting air out the rear that would of course raise temperatures a tad for the power supply but maybe that would help in the long run I just I prefer to isolate it for now to see how the overall system fares and here's another look at graphics card fitment it was very close to not working out but I really like the way this looks it looks like almost the case was designed around the dimensions of the carard let's jump right to it then powering on for the first time I've actually got a screen connected because the Corsair 2 TB nvme that we connected has an operating system system uh based on AMD already installed I don't recall where the power button is is it on this side yep there we go so uh yeah pretty much no RGB as intended not bad at all I imagine it's going to take probably close to a minute to actually get a post because this been the first time this am5 platform is firing up it's going to have to train memory and uh yeah am5 it always takes a good while I will say though we're only using two sticks of ddr5 not like we could use any more anyway there's only two slots on the board so that should should cut down on times just a bit oh you know what I should do is probably connect this HDMI cable there it is no problemo pretty easy pretty straightforward build um didn't take too long and that's a good sign so we'll we'll reset the it's usually TPM yeah and uh then we'll be able to load straight into Windows just tweaking some fan curves quickly here and the bio is going to set the pump to full speed just for good measure also going to try to enable Expo not sure of the tolerances with this CPU but we'll give it a shot and I'm going to Nerf the CPU just a tad core performance boost we're going to disable that this is just to uh keep the system a bit cooler if possible and straight away it loads right into windows again thanks to that drive that we carried over from our previous system I'm also surprised that our memory overclock stuck I'll have to go back and verify that cuz sometimes you think it did and it didn't AMD like I said can be very finicky now if you were following along and say building a rig very similar to this one it's very likely that your drive is blank so you're not going to load into Windows obviously there's nothing on it for the system to load into at which point you're going to need to install Windows we have a guide for that specific thing in the video description if you want to check it out um there's also one other step that you might be interested in cu the slide effect remember Windows activation watermarks are never a pretty site so if you have just installed a fresh copy of Windows for the first time in a new system or maybe you're just reformatting and you're switching components it is very easy to activate using our sponsor vipd key now if we assume you already purchased a key from earlier all you have to do when you load into your windows home screen for the first time is click the search bar off to the bottom left then type the word activate and click enter from here simply click the change or add product key button and when prompted paste the activation key you obtained earlier then click activate and allow Windows to work its magic it will take usually about a minute or two and once successful you'll no longer see a watermark and you'll have a fully activated copy of Windows remember vipd keys running their Christmas sale only for a limited time so if you're in this boat where you need a Windows activation key and you don't want to spend $100 or more on a retail key click one of the links below that corresponds to your version of Windows and remember a check out to use our special offer code gsvp for a 30% discount on your order again that's gsvp for That Sweet discount so this build turned out very nice uh thankfully we had no issues I've already ddu the old graphics driver I think we had an AMD graphics card in this rig or at least that was tied to this storage drive before we've ddu that we've got the updated NVIDIA drivers for this RTX 3080 and there's only one question remaining how well does it perform interesting proposition because we do have a slightly weaker CPU than you'd expect in a rig with an RTX 380 in it but you'll be surprised this thing actually holds its own quite well even in higher resolution gaming I want to start first with 3D Mark time span now this is just a 1440p synthetic in the dx12 API but this it's a good idea of kind of where a system Stacks up among all the others that have tested in this suite and a score of better than 78% of all subit results isn't too bad you can see our CPU score does lag behind our graphic score by a fair margin but I don't expect this to be too detrimental when gaming at a higher resolution my main concern with this rig was avoiding stuttering which is why I wanted to use a very very modern platform from AMD and the 7600 will do just fine in this regard now for the following benchmarks I'm going to stress the 4K resolution this will be hooked up to my 4K TV upstairs which does have 120 hzz refresh rate and to my surprise depending on the title this system actually held up quite well my target was again 60 FPS not necessarily 120 I just wanted it to be fluid I wanted very minimal frame time spikes and I was able to pull that off in most cases around the medium to highish preset if I want to run emulation that's not going to be a problem at all if I want to run some Modern AAA titles and I'm willing to scale things back a bit that's not a problem at all either so I would say by and large mission accomplished with at least the parts Choice a lot of folks think you need like some expensive CPU anytime you want to touch the 4K resolution and that's simply not the case obviously the graphics card is going to handle the bulk of that load until you start venturing into very high refresh rates where the CPU is having to work a lot more to take care of all of those frames drawn by the graphics card but at this point if we play it smart and sort of Leverage in-game settings to keep us around a 60 or 70 or maybe even 80 FPS Target you'll notice that the CPU actually remains relatively untaxed it will again depend on the title but by and large the graphics card will be doing most of the heavy lifting here otherwise this rig turned out very nice I'm a big fan of the way it looks I think Silverstone makes some really good cases they are a bit quirky at times yes they might not be the sexiest but I mean that's that's their Niche this is what they've chosen to to to really pursue and I think for the right buyer these are perfect they can also present unique cable management and airf flow challenges that you otherwise wouldn't run into with a conventional gaming tower and I quite like that I mean they give you the options to expand and if you want to increase air flow you certainly could you have the option to throw in an AIO I mean a lot of htpcs don't usually have aiio in them because they just don't fit they're they're smaller more compact chassis this is certainly larger it might not even fit in your entertainment cabinet if you have one so be sure to check the depth I know it won't fit in the one downstairs but it will fit in the one that I have upstairs and that's where this is going to go so I'm just do a bit of measuring before you purchase and uh otherwise I think you'll be very happy with this so again the grand Dia 11 I'm going to have it linked below as well as all of the other components that we've thrown into this build if you enjoyed watching this one let me know by giving this video a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated consider leaving a comment down below let me know what you would have done differently if you were tasked with building an htpc somewhere in this like performance range maybe price ranges well I actually haven't priced this stuff out I wonder if it even makes sense from a price uh perspective certainly if you can get the RTX 380 used so I'll have an Ebay link for the 3080 down below but if you insist on a new card instead maybe I'll put like a 4070 or something as an alternative if you insist on buying new and I get that to each his or her own consider subscribing if you haven't already ready check out our social media links if you want to get involved elsewhere and uh yeah stay tuned for the next one my name is Greg thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 72,694

Keywords: htpc, home theater pc, how to build an htpc, home theater computer, vr pc, vr gaming pc, gaming pc, gaming pc build, gaming htpc build, small form factor pc, computer build, mini itx build, living room pc, Computer Hardware, home theatre pc, Tech, greg salazar, PC Gaming, how to build a htpc, home theater, Technology, Gaming pc 2023, let's build, lets build, let's build an htpc, How to

Id: bCmkb2f7vM0

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023