What do you recommend???
| # | Post |
|---|---|
| 1 | Want to make a fresh media pc... Should build a ITX system or NUC? It's only for playing movies and music and surfing the net. I am thinking a i3 chip of 10th gen or 11th gen. What would be the better media machine and why? mr_lovebug - 2021-09-15 11:53:00 |
| 2 | Our media PC is using a now ancient third generation i3-3210, but it runs well fast enough for playing movies, and music and surfing the net. It is using a small form factor dell box which we got for free, it originally had a celeron, but I have upgraded to the i3, although the celeron was actually fine for a media PC. I would go for a small form factor or ultra small form factor PC as you can get them really cheap second hand. If you need to reduce space a NUC might be better, but they are more expensive. tygertung - 2021-09-15 12:08:00 |
| 3 | Our "media PC" in the lounge has 2 functions - streaming of content (Netflix, Sky Go, content from NAS etc) and for storing footage from the security camera on the front of the house. Its actually a NUC, with a 2 core/4 thread 6th gen i5, 8GB ram, 256GB SSD and 2TB hard drive for the cameras. I think when I purchased this (yes it was second hand) I paid about $500 for it, which included everything except the 2TB drive that I added myself. Normally I would purchase tech new, but the price of this vs purchasing a whole new system for what it was being used for made no sense to me. There is certainly no need to spend on a whole new system for the sake of playing movies and music etc, slightly older hardware is more than capable of doing this. cube_guy - 2021-09-15 12:40:00 |
| 4 | I'd get a NUC with an Intel 11th gen. As far as I know the 11th gen Intel mobile CPUs have some fairly good integrated graphics. Few years ago I would have gone ITX but I'm old and lazy now, and it really seems like those tiny NUCs have much more power than required for HT / browsing duties. stevexc - 2021-09-15 13:22:00 |
| 5 | mr_lovebug wrote:
I used to like NUC's, but hard to upgrade and not exactly cheap or flexible. If you go ITX, then power supplies and mainboards are easy to mix and match, upgrade memory and HDDs etc. For the i3, a few months ago upgraded my daughters gaming PC, and the new gen i3's are faster than older gen i5s and new i3's were cheaper.than buying an older gen i5 that fitted her mainboard:. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i3-6100-vs-Intel- We were able to bring across her old drives, memory, video card and case so saved some money but got a better PC. For media PC's there are some dedicated players available off the shelf that are OK, but they never seem to age well. Or if you want to tinker, then Raspberry Pi 4's are fun . gblack - 2021-09-15 13:23:00 |
| 6 | Hard to upgrade a NUC? No way. 4 screws gets the casing off and you have direct access to upgrade either the ram or hard drive config. cube_guy - 2021-09-15 13:40:00 |
| 7 | Thank you to all for your advice and thoughts. I am tempted to do the New NUC system as I can mount m.2 nvme and pick from a range of ddr4 ram sizes... Upgrades are not a issue, just want something small easy to use... mr_lovebug - 2021-09-15 17:02:00 |
| 8 | 3rd gen i5 4gb ddr3 mini Dell pc here. mrfxit - 2021-09-17 07:33:00 |
| 9 | With a media PC you need to understand what you graphic engine supports in terms of hardware decoding. I would assume you would want to future proof something that can handle 4K HEVC/x265 media - for that you will need at least a Gen7 intel. The NUC of that generation and above should work and they also have an HDMI 2.0a I believe (this is required for HDR playback). Now if you go for something of a lower gen cpu - they you loose hardware support for that type of media - But it you get a PC with a spare 16x PCIe then you can add a video card which take care of the decoding for you - the GT1030 is a perfect entry level card for this. Don't get me wrong HEVC media can be played without hardware decoding but this is CPU intensive. Edited by acura at 5:34 pm, Sat 18 Sep acura - 2021-09-18 17:30:00 |
| 10 | personally can't be bothered with a media PC. I run plex on my main desktop and store files on a NAS (you could just use a internal disk for media storage). bitsnpieces2020 - 2021-09-18 19:13:00 |
| 11 | I have Jellyfin setup (a netflix like system, bit like plex i guess), mainly for the kids overseas to use to access my collection. i can access it on the phone via a browser while out and about thanks to DDNS. I used to use it myself on the LAN but it's really simpler to just play the media directly from the NAS network share in VLC etc Edited by king1 at 7:56 pm, Sat 18 Sep king1 - 2021-09-18 19:55:00 |
| 12 | bitsnpieces2020 wrote: Plex is an annoying yet interesting kettle of fish - I'm personally dropping it shortly because my dam 1 year old TV is dropping support for plex in a few weeks! Casting to my chromecast unit does not seem to work with HEVC content - I get an H4 error. Plex can end up doing all the heavy lighting on the server side if client side cannot handle direct play or direct stream - this is specially a pain with more and more common h265 video if the client hardware isn't up to date. Plex transcoding h265 back to h264 is pretty taxing - server needs to decode the file then re encode to a compatible client format. My old Xeon X3430 server runs at 100% CPU usage for 1080 h265 content to my TV which is only h264 for plex (although full h265 support from a USB drive - hate panasonic sometimes) - 4k and poor thing cannot keep up (buffering every few seconds). Yet of course to my HTPC running a GT1030 - full plex direct play support and everything works but why bother I just network play from KODI or PotPlayer. BUT, BUT to complicate things further - the PLEX player on my HTPC does play HDR 4k media real nicely - so i still use it for that! One more note on the plex server - this does support hardware accelerated transcoding but that requires a specific hardware AND a paid Plex pass account! acura - 2021-09-18 22:14:00 |
| 13 | yeah, i coughed up for a lifetime plexpass, still cheaper than a dedicated media PC. bitsnpieces2020 - 2021-09-19 18:37:00 |
| 14 | The point of our specific media pc is to have full internet access & stream to the tv. Twice the size of a modern NUC / laptop, less then half the size of a std desktop pc & can easily be had for free (or very cheap) Does what we ask of it Edited by mrfxit at 7:56 am, Mon 20 Sep mrfxit - 2021-09-20 07:56:00 |
| 15 | bitsnpieces2020 wrote: mrfxit - 2021-09-20 07:58:00 |
| 16 | bitsnpieces2020 wrote: I almost did! Would have been fuming as my nearly new TV is dropping support for plex!! acura - 2021-09-20 14:10:00 |
| 17 | acura wrote: mrfxit - 2021-09-20 14:39:00 |
| 18 | Ya but cannot beat plex being a button away on your remote, even my wife can use this! - with My media PC i gotta wake-on-lan cause i'm too lazy to get off my ass (am still old school in feeling the need to power down a PC). Looking forward to trying the nVidia shield I have on order... Edited by acura at 7:34 pm, Mon 20 Sep acura - 2021-09-20 19:34:00 |
