A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate the SSD and HDD.
The Intel 510 250GB SSD delivers great overall performance, peaking around 476 MB/s in the sequential read test. The Samsung 2TB hard drive by comparison peaks just under 140 MB/s.
Tags 2600K Building a Core i7 HTPC on Sapphire Mini ITX Building a Core i7 HTPC with Sapphire Mini ITX H67 core i7 Core i7 2600k Intel Intel 510 intel SSD media center news Review Sapphire Sapphire motherboard
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Now thats what im talking about !
Thats a hell of a nice little system, better than my big ass desktop rig 🙁
Id put in the new iceQ 6970 or something like that. let it kick some serious ass, but noise and wattage would rise a lot.
I think over £1000 is a bit much for any media center, but thats more a full fledged performance PC. that case seems pretty cool though.
Nice board from Sapphire, under £100 is a good price point
The board is fantastic. its put me in mind to build a high end, small computer for downstairs. id probably opt for the 2500k.
The PSU seems overpowered for the build, but at least it would be running quiet due to low overhead?. a method in the madness? obviously there for a better discrete card later if wanted.
I always meant to build a media center and never got tempted by Fusion or ATOM as my mate has an atom desktop he built for 200 quid. he has lost all his hair using it, its that bloody slow.
this board looks to be ideal for a new PC. its got everything you need,. well maybe except crossfire support.
Yeah thats lovely, nice job, I could live with that myself
Personally id go for a silverstone case, and use a 2500k with maybe a low noise card in the 68xx range.
AT first I thought the system was unbalanced, why put a low end video card in with a Core i7 2600k? I see however the point now, its to keep noise down to as low as possible, but still offering decent gaming. im surprised that card is as good as the tests show. very impressive from sapphire.
Nice system, my media center isn’t as powerful as that, but I really only use it for watching tv shows via the tv.
The 2600k is really a very good price now, just over £200 for 4+4 cores. wasnt it closer to £300 when it was released?
All very well, but where do you plug in the TV tuner (or more likely, TWO tuners)?
The problem with mini-ITX is that there just aren’t any slots to plug stuff into, which is a bit of a non-starter for a media centre. USB isn’t really the way to go for this kind of thing (hardly makes for a tidy system and it’s relatively expensive), so the only way to go is a larger mother board.