BUILD IT
This month, we’re on the hunt for a device that reaches the heavenly heights of headless home theater
Create a super-slick Mini ITX HTPC.
THE CONCEPT
IT’S GOOD TO STEP AWAY from the rig once in a while. To spend time with the family, sit down, and enjoy a bit of televisual entertainment. After all, there’s more to the world than pixels and digitized avatars waiting to be quashed. There’s a whole variety of delights to watch, with real people, in the comfort of your own couch.
So, what’s the plot of this particular tale? We want to build a small form factor, headless, home theater PC, redesigned for the digital age (sans 5.25-inch drive bay), capable of streaming content over a wireless or wired network, anywhere in the home. Because, when all’s said and done, in the age of Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, and all manner of other digital streaming services, there’s really no excuse not to be streaming content direct to your big-screen TV. It’s easy, it’s convenient, and it doesn’t tie you into any unnecessary cable packages or cumbersome Blu-ray drives.
But, let’s face it, you can already enjoy that, thanks to the likes of Nvidia’s Shield console or the increasingly popular Android TV boxes. It’s the versatility of the Windows PC platform that we’re after here, though. After all, we stream, we game, we work, and we network on the platform. We should be able to watch movies and TV in comfort, too.
THE SPECS
THIS BUILD was all about the chassis: the Fractal Design Node 304. It’s an ITX beauty, capable of housing a serious amount of heft. To minimize our budget, though, we went with an Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition dual-core processor, clocking in at 3.2GHz, with 16GB of low-profile DDR3 at 1,600MT/s, a 650W PSU (a little overkill), a 120GB SSD for the boot drive, and 2TB of old-school storage for all our media. It’s worth noting that the motherboard we actually put into action is the Gigabyte Z97N Gaming 5, which is unfortunately now only available for $300 on Amazon, used. But as the motherboard isn’t going to add much in the way of performance, opting for an alternative, cheaper, H97 board instead is fine.
We stuck with the retail cooler—unless you’re planning on overclocking the Pentium G3258, you can get away with retail, and due to the lack of internal componentry involved, the two 92mm intake fans at the front of the chassis, and the rear 120mm, is plenty.
So, a scraping together of spare parts? Sort of. That’s the beauty of having older hardware lying around. However, if you were looking to do something similar with the Z170 chipset, we suggest opting for a low-end Intel Pentium G4400, a Samsung SM951 for boot drive, and a Gigabyte GA-Z170N ITX motherboard or equivalent (remember to make sure it supports the M.2 connection standard).