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Building a Core i7 HTPC with Sapphire Mini ITX H67

Dirt 3 is a rallying videogame and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters, although the “Colin McRae” tag has been completely removed from this iteration (having been previously been removed from American versions of previous games in the series).

At 1080p, the game is playable if AA is disabled. We tweaked the settings as shown above to maintain smooth framerates throughout. They never dropped below 34 fps which is a great result for this high end ‘media center' system.

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13 comments

  1. Now thats what im talking about !

  2. Thats a hell of a nice little system, better than my big ass desktop rig 🙁

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. The board is fantastic. its put me in mind to build a high end, small computer for downstairs. id probably opt for the 2500k.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Yeah thats lovely, nice job, I could live with that myself

  9. Personally id go for a silverstone case, and use a 2500k with maybe a low noise card in the 68xx range.

  10. 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.

  11. Nice system, my media center isn’t as powerful as that, but I really only use it for watching tv shows via the tv.

  12. 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?

  13. 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.