The following is not purely related to HTPC, so you are excused if you prefer to just skip this entry.
Also, please note that it's not my intention to hijack this thread with an unrelated discussion in any way:
I just want to highlight the hidden potential contained in this otherwise untelling "budget build".
Now that you've been warned, if you feel like you have 5 minutes to spare for an educational reading, you can go ahead.
So... I recently built my HTPC based on the build on this thread
by eskro with CPU
Intel Celeron G530.
For the motherboard I used a very similar one, not the same due to local availability but that's another story.
For OS, I went with
Linux Mint, which was a breeze to install even for this amateurish Linux n00bie.
There were some pains and a steep learning curve making audio to go through HDMI, but it all worked like a charm in the end.
Other extra Linux-only advantages posed no problems (remote ssh, VNC, automatic backups, etc.)
Soon after finalizing the HTPC and while I was still drooling every time I played a 1080p movie
, my digital life took an unexpected turn: all of a sudden I needed another computer in my house in order to build an
Asterisk server (a VoIP PBX).
Damn! Buy another computer? And so soon? Crap!
A VoIP-savvy friend of mine pointed me towards a good Asterisk distro (
PBX in a flash) which should make my life easier because everything is pretty much self-contained and preconfigured. But it's a full distro, so it needs it's own machine for installing an OS and packages and a tremendous sh*tload of stuff in it.
Long-story short, the
G530, despite it's budget-oriented price of just around $50, had a trick under its sleeve:
VT-x or Virtualization Technology. In fact, I think it's the cheapest Intel CPU you can find with this feature.
This little feature, normally unused in any normal build like a dedicated HTPC, made it possible for me to install the PBX distro in a Virtual Machine, running it 'headless' or in the background without interfering in any way with the XBMC front-end.
The VM uses about 5 to 7% of CPU and less than 512MB of RAM, so still leaving most CPU processing power and RAM available and unused for XBMC usage.
The physical machine is now turned on 24x7 so the phone system is up at all times and my wife can talk all she wants while watching a movie!
So in summary, the "extra computer" was accomplished investing
$0, just by tapping into the spare CPU cycles and Virtualization instructions. Just added a piece of software really (albeit a complex one), but
the G530 proved to be an absolute beast capable of eating heavy-duty tasks with ease!
I guess you could say I'm sold!!
PS: I'm not associated with
Intel nor
eskro in any way. I'm just an average budget-conscious end-user who takes pride in extracting as much juice as possible into the available resources. Call it a "life philosophy"
PS2:
A hat-tip to the excellent work of the open-source community in general, and in particular to XBMC, to eskro for his hardware recommendations, to Linux, Asterisk and VirtualBox OSE. THANK YOU!