I could cut corners, but…
This evening I went through the exercise of thinking about the parts I would use if I was building a brand new computer to serve as our living room media centre. I went into this exercise thinking this is something I’d build if I wasn’t thinking about cost.
The parts I’ve chosen are not necessarily optimal for the build, some, like the CPU cooling, are reflective of personal likes. While I’ve never seen the Thermaltake case I’ve picked here, and Thermaltake is generally my last choice for parts, the case fits the drive and space requirements, but does it in a less than mid-tower size (I think). While I only added 2 x hard drives in this build, the case needed to have space for 4 hard drives. This eliminated a lot of cases.
The 4 core, 8 thread Intel CPU certainly isn’t the most powerful, but it fits the application. This is a pretty expensive build, and reality is I’d probably never build this for myself. There are too many other things in life a lot more important than a computer that would be obsolete shortly after buying it.
Currently the 16TB Seagate CMR IronWolf Pro drives are on sale. They’re actually less than the first 8TB IronWolf (non-Pro) drive that I’m currently using was when I first got it.
Without further ado, here’s the PC Part Picker breakdown of the build:
Parts List
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i3-13100 3.4 GHz Quad-Core Processor | $189.99 @ Memory Express |
| CPU Cooler | be quiet! Pure Rock 2 Black CPU Cooler | $113.62 @ Amazon Canada |
| Motherboard | MSI MAG B660M MORTAR WIFI DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard | $238.18 @ iSanek |
| Memory | Kingston FURY Beast 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL17 Memory | $62.99 @ Newegg Canada |
| Storage | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive | $129.97 @ Amazon Canada |
| Storage | Seagate IronWolf Pro 16 TB 3.5″ 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive | $384.99 @ Newegg Canada |
| Storage | Seagate IronWolf Pro 16 TB 3.5″ 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive | $384.99 @ Newegg Canada |
| Video Card | MSI MECH 2X OC Radeon RX 6500 XT 4 GB Video Card | $223.97 @ iSanek |
| Case | Thermaltake Level 20 XT ATX Desktop Case | $449.98 @ Newegg Canada |
| Power Supply | Corsair RM750x (2021) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply | $174.05 @ Vuugo |
| Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts | ||
| Total | $2352.73 | |
| Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-02-17 21:43 EST-0500 |
What about more budget options?
This is an expensive build for a Core i3, but it’s worth mentioning that the 4 core, 8 thread i3 here has a higher cpubenchmark.net score than my 10 core 20 thread XEON E5-2690 v2 CPU. I bet the CPU could encode video better than my current workstation. But, I wouldn’t use the i3-13100 for that purpose, it’s strictly here for video playback, and it’s overkill for that. I’d keep this CPU as it’s reasonably priced for the power.
The CPU cooler is also probably overkill. It’s been ages since I’ve even looked at Intel’s new processors, so I’m not even sure they come with “stock” coolers anymore. This is one place someone might want to cut a corner if the processor came with a stock cooler. I happen to love be quiet’s coolers. I have a Dark Rock Slim cooler on my personal workstation, and just love the quality.
Another place corners could be cut is the storage. My media collection is pretty sizeable. I filled my 8TB hard drive in just 7 months. But I filled the drive with media that was uncompressed. A single Blu-ray disc sometimes hits 35-50GB, so it’s easy to see how the drive got filled. I started compressing all my Blu-ray discs and now have space to spare on the 8TB drive. There are currently 2 x 8TB drives in our media centre, one drive gets backed up to the other every Sunday at 2 a.m. via rsync. If there are no changes, nothing new is synced. One could buy a smaller NVMe drive for the operating system and save some money, but I chose a 1TB NVMe drive with the thought of including a handful of Steam games. I haven’t included the cost for Windows here as I would install Xubuntu Linux. The biggest savings would be smaller hard drives, but I wouldn’t go smaller because of my collection.
Probably the most logical thing to cut the cost on would be the case, at almost $500 it’s a ridiculous amount to pay for a case when there are cases that would do the job for less than $100. There are other cases I looked at that are more than $100, but less than the $500 of the Thermaltake Level 20XT. I like the be quiet Pure Base 600, the Lian Li O11 Dynamic Evo, the Rosewill Mirage P700, and the Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX.
No intention
Really I have no intention of buying this build. Our media centre works very well. There’s actually no good reason for this list other than the exercise of building something from scratch. It was fun to see what I’d choose. Six months ago this might have been an all AMD Ryzen build.