Budget 0-20k 2017 Budget HTPC Rig : Needs to have SSD & able to play BD- ISO with HD Audio Bitstreaming

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delhiboy1

Disciple
  1. Hi Guys,
I am looking to set up a secondary HTPC in my drawing room for media playback. This will be connected to my AVR hooked upto my LED TV. I need DTS HD /True HD Audio Bitstreaming and thus a Windows machine is the only option.
I was also evaluating the Shield TV for this purpose , right now its a toss between the two. The HTPC can play Blu Rays in the future by attaching a BD-ROM , which the Shield cant.

  1. What is your budget?
    • 15K is the sweet spot, CPU & SSD can be sourced from USA, rest all locally in Delhi.
  2. I have shortlisted the below options , please pour in your suggestions:
  3. CPU - 7th Gen Intel Pentium G4600 Kaby Lake ( read up somewhere that the Intel HD on this thing is pretty much the same as on the 4th Gen Intels? In that case, I can even get a 4th Gen Intel !) SSD : any 64-128 Gb SSD Drive will be fine. Again, longer warranty is the key rather than outright performance. This is only going to be used to boot the OS, media playback will be through an external HDD.

    • I will use a Wireless Mouse to control the system.

    • Blu Ray drive (future)
  5. Where will you buy this hardware? (Online/City/TE Dealer)
    • Nehru Place , Open to online purchase
  6. Would you consider buying a second hand hardware from the TE market
    • Not really , maybe the CPU ..
  7. What is your intended use for this PC/hardware
    • HTPC

    • Watching Full HD movies
  8. Which operating system do you intend to use with this configuration?
    • Windows 10 64 bit ,
    • I was temporarily using a HD 4400, 8 Gb , i3 4130 system to playback my media and it worked flawless, so I know that a similar specced system should run my HTPC just fine.
[DOUBLEPOST=1499141237][/DOUBLEPOST]No replies? In the early TE days, this type of "what rig" Qs would get a response within hours !
Aww come on people !
 
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For madVR with more advanced pixel shader based scalars, you need at least a GTX 1050 ti class hardware. Onboard just won't work.

I'm using an i3 4130 + 1050 ti but even that is not enough for anything more than 30fps 1080p.
 
intel's new Iris 640/650 graphic chipsets work totally fine. I have the 7th Gen Intel NUC and it is serving me good. Does 4K @ 60Hz and my plex server works stutterless.
 
Vasishta.Sushant said:
intel's new Iris 640/650 graphic chipsets work totally fine. I have the 7th Gen Intel NUC and it is serving me good. Does 4K @ 60Hz and my plex server works stutterless.
Click to expand...
Depends on what floats your boat. With a normal renderer even a Celeron j3060 will work too.

Madvr is a completely different beast.
 
Hi Guys, thanks for your inputs- but looks like you missed the part highlighted in blue..

I already have a general purpose rig (i3 4130, 8Gb, Onboard HD4400 and it runs MPC-HC + MadVR flawlessly (no additional pre/post pixel shaders at all though )
The G4600 has HD630 , will it be fine?

My ultimate requirement is to stream Netflix, Amazon Prime in 5.1 and to play all Local, media , Blu Ray Discs & rips with HD Audio bitstreamed to my AVR. ( I know that I will need to get a Fire Stick for the streaming to get 5.1) .

Phew, all this drama precipitated by a change from Windows TP to a Macbook Air. What crap .
 
Actually I did ask.. and I am not sure why folks are saying that you need a killer rig to play MKVs with MPC-HC + Mad VR.. it works fine on onboard HD w/o any discrete GFX card
 
My bad you did ask onboard cant process madvr high end settings
Using madvr with medium settings is useless
So take a call accordingly
 
delhiboy1 said:
What are these high settings...I find pixel shaders pretty much useless .. what else..
Click to expand...
NGU or NNEDI3 with 64 neurons or higher. It'll bring most GPUs to a crawl. If you reclock to a higher display refresh from 23Hz then it gets even more taxing. HDR 10bit and 4k can bring a 1080 to its knees.
 
This might be a slight tangent to the ongoing discussion, yet related. Why do you we need MadVR/ NGU stuff? I just play using Kodi/Plex and things work fine. Am I missing something?
 
I would have been happy with Kodi on Windows ( was fine with XBMC) ; but on Mac, the experience is pathetic. It's Image quality is impeccable on both OS.
I find VLC much simpler and snappier to use.

I will rest this discussion now- Have read up a bit and it seems to me that the HD Audio part seems to be a bit overrated (atleast in my case, when I cant get it to work on a Mac)
The difference between the core DTS & the DTS HD Stream is minuscule & likely benefits are imperceptible, atleast with my equipment levels.

https://fixafix.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/dts-hd-ma-vs-dts-core-audible-difference/
 
Vasishta.Sushant said:
This might be a slight tangent to the ongoing discussion, yet related. Why do you we need MadVR/ NGU stuff? I just play using Kodi/Plex and things work fine. Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

Better quality upscaling. Once you are addicted it's like a drug. Standard definition videos look pretty close to hd. For 4k upscaling of 1080p content, it gets even better. Latest versions of Kodi supports madvr for output.
 
is there ay benefit w.r.t ImageVideo quality with the 1050/Ti over Onboard Intel HD 4400? if all one is viewing are 1080p rips, Blurays.
 
delhiboy1 said:
is there ay benefit w.r.t ImageVideo quality with the 1050/Ti over Onboard Intel HD 4400? if all one is viewing are 1080p rips, Blurays.
Click to expand...

Even if the video is 1080p and display is 1080p, to display the output, it still requires chroma upscaling as video is stored in YUV12 or NV12 format that requires up conversion to RGB. Madvr running a good scaling algorithm like. NNEDI on a discrete gpu will look significantly better.
 
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