DIY home-theatre PC on a budget

This month, Zak Storey is on the hunt for a device that reaches the heavenly heights of headless home theater.

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 digitised 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, Stan, Foxtel Go 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, right?

DDR AND PROCESSOR CHOICES

In a build like this, processor choice is one of the few decisions you’re going to have to make early on. The Intel Pentium G3258 AE is a marvel, capable of punching out hefty overclocks up to 1GHz over stock — if you’ve got the cooling capacity. The retail cooler leaves quite a bit to be desired, but finding suitable cooling solutions in the Node 304 is challenging. Even Corsair’s compact Hydro AIO doesn’t quite fit here. But this is a very basic home theater/streaming PC, so do you really need the extra grunt in a machine like this? On top of that, you have to consider what RAM you’re going to use. We decided to crack out this set of Crucial super low-profile DIMMs, providing us with 16GB of DDR3. They’re a little antiquated by today’s standards, but are still overkill for what we intend to do with this build.

PCIE WOES

So the ITX form factor, while pleasingly compact for our aesthetic requirements, allows itself the luxury of just one PCIe slot. That’s enough for one graphics card, a soundcard, or some form of PCIe add-in card. Unfortunately, the Fractal Node case doesn’t give you much in the way of room for manoeuver. Once you have the power supply installed, along with a couple of hard drives, fitting a GPU around the cables in the Fractal Node is damn near impossible. In fact, this is the only time that we’ve found a suitable application for the tiny footprint of AMD’s R9 Nano. The reason we bring this up is mostly down to the troubleshooting we had to go through just to get that Pentium G3258 to work once the system was put together. But we’ll touch on that in the conclusion...

POWER SUPPLY PROBLEMS

As you can see, this build is messy. Very messy. Unfortunately, the Node’s low-slung design leaves little room for any form of cable management. Even with an infinite number of cable ties, it’s a struggle to tidy this up effectively. And that’s not the end of the problems: If you ever fancy transforming this spec into a gaming system, your GPU choice is going to be substantially limited. In fact, in a lot of ways, you’d be better off purchasing a non-modular PSU. The reason we say this is because most nonmodulars have all their cables bunched up in one corner — as opposed to laid out and nicely organised along the back of the power supply — which saves space, and hopefully helps you install your GPU with as little trouble as possible.

PASS-THROUGHS AND COOLING

Because the power supply is situated at the front of this build, we have to make do with a substantial pass-through, heading along the side of the case. It doesn’t cause much in the way of problems, but it’s worth remembering that you’ll need to leave the power switch on here before closing up your chassis. There’s nothing worse than closing up a chassis, plugging everything in, and then scratching your head, wondering why it isn’t powering up. Also, you can just about glimpse those dual 92mm intake fans at the top there. They’re mighty quiet for fans of this size, yet still provide plenty of oomph when it comes to internal cooling.

HARD DRIVE CADDIES

One of the neat features Fractal included in the design of its Node 304 is these sweet little drive cages. Capable of mounting two drives in each, these sit snugly in the top of your chassis, along a cross-member support pole. Three come as standard with the case; we opted to use one, and slapped it right in the middle, between the two fans, and removed the two extraneous cages to improve internal airflow. Each caddie comes with rubber grommets for spinning hard drives, and traditional mounting points for SSDs. Just remember to orient your drives the correct way round when installing them, so your connectors are facing away from the end of the Fractal logo.

EVEN MORE COOLING

That’s one meaty 140mm fan in the back of the chassis. We reoriented it so it’s drawing air into the chassis, as opposed to pumping it out. Ideally, it may have been better to see whether we could attempt to mount a single AIO cooler in here, but to keep the cost down, we opted to go with the retail cooler instead. There’s also an exceptionally simple fan controller located on the top-right, too, just above the PCIe brackets. It comes with three settings — low, medium and high — and three headers internally, for the three fans powered by a single Molex adapter.