Need help building a media center PC

I am looking to put together a dedicated media center for my living room setup. My main priority is being able to power on the mini tower remotely via a remote control, and I suspect an Intel Core i3 processor would be more than sufficient for my needs. This machine won't be doing any heavy lifting; it’s strictly for multimedia playback and web browsing. I don't have much need for massive storage capacity since I'm not exactly a digital hoarder—my collection consists almost entirely of family photos and home videos. However, I do insist on using high-quality, reliable components when it comes to the power supply, the case, and everything else in between...
It absolutely needs Wi-Fi capability. Ideally, I'd prefer a built-in solution rather than relying on a USB dongle, though I suppose a dongle would work if necessary. I'll also need some sort of wireless keyboard and mouse combo...

Most importantly, I need to stay within a reasonable budget. I am hoping that $1000 will be enough to cover the costs... 🙂

I’m currently running an ASUS ROG Maximus paired with an i3 4330 processor and 4GB of RAM. It’s housed in a Fractal Design Node 304 case, complete with a Be Quiet power supply, an SSD, and all the other little bells and whistles. Since the motherboard actually has built-in Wi-Fi, you could easily pull this off much more affordably than you might think. Honestly, do you even really need a remote? If you’re absolutely dead set on having one, you can just grab those USB receiver kits on eBay to handle the startup process (<$50). Or, if you want to go the free route, just install VLC Media Player along with some Apple Bonjour services and enable smartphone control directly within the media player. There’s a default app for VLC Media Player, sure, but why settle for mediocrity when you can use TradingView? It’s significantly more polished.

What did the whole thing end up costing you? Just eyeballing it, I'd say $1333... That's a great case, though; it looks really sharp. I suppose I might have to put something together myself eventually...

I think I might have one Nvidia GeForce GT 730 240GB SSD lying around somewhere.
I've got one ASROCK H110M-ITX/ac motherboard on hand. It's an Intel B150 chipset, runs DDR4, and features standard audio, SATA, Gigabit LAN, and PCI-E 3.0. Comes with DVI, HDMI, and USB 3.0 ports—a classic mITX build with an LGA 1151 socket, I guess.
Just picked up an Intel Core i3-6100 desktop processor (3.7GHz, 3MB, LGA1151) in the retail box.
Just one stick of Kingston DDR4 2133MHz, CL15, 4GB.
I've got one black Corsair Airflow Series case up for grabs, though it doesn't come with a power supply.
Just one Fortron Hexa+ 400W, 80+.

Total: $1013 I guess I’m just here to help out with Futura-IT.

Carl Sanchez4 said:What did the whole thing end up costing you? Just eyeballing it, I'd say $1333... That's a great case, though; it looks really sharp. I suppose I might have to put something together myself eventually...

To be perfectly honest, the total cost actually climbed north of $6,000, though I’m factoring in a few things I already had on hand—like a Kingston 240GB SSD that was sitting around (worth about $50-$267), that incredibly silent, low-profile Noctua cooler (the NH-L9i), and a massive 6TB hard drive (because, unlike you, I happen to be a bit of a data hoarder 😁). My main motivation for picking this specific motherboard was honestly just the sheer number of SATA ports available, plus I needed a processor capable of handling integrated graphics that can actually chew through any video or audio format I throw at it without breaking a sweat.

Something along these lines—you’d just need to pop in some RAM and an SSD, then grab a Wi-Fi adapter.

The main thing is that those Skylake i3 chips come with built-in H.265 support, which is a total game-changer if you're looking at 4K content or anything similar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/htpc/commen...h265_decoding/

He might not be worried about 4K just yet, but this is all about being future-proof. You'll just need to make sure the motherboard has an HDMI 2.0 or DP 1.2 port to handle it.

Give me a break. 4K resolution has absolutely nothing to do with the h265 codec itself. My old Haswell chip can chew through 4K just fine, much like any other processor whose integrated graphics actually meet the necessary specs. However—and this is the crucial part—if you lack native support for the h265 codec, your CPU is forced to handle everything via software; if your processor is even remotely underpowered, you won't just be struggling with 4K h265, you might find yourself stumbling through 1080p or even 720p content at that rate. 😁
It’s probably not worth losing sleep over "future-proofing" unless you are desperate for h265 support this very second. Once the technology truly takes hold, we’ll likely see a market flooded with fanless graphics cards available for next to nothing that offer native hardware support—provided, of course, you have an available PCI slot.

I mean, if you can get that HD 530 integrated graphics for the exact same price, why wouldn't you?

As for those cheap low-end PCI-e cards sitting around for a few bucks—that’s actually where the issue lies. From what I can see, neither Nvidia nor AMD is interested in churning out new chips for that bottom-tier category anymore. It looks like Nvidia will likely wrap things up with the GTX 1050 (which sits around $200+ and competes with something like an RX 470) just like they did with the GTX 950 in the last generation. On the AMD side, their most budget-friendly option with H.265 support will probably be the GTX 1050, which should land somewhere around a hundred bucks (not counting APUs), and that’ll basically be the extent of the new lineup. In the lower-end bracket, we're mostly just looking at a bunch of rebranded old tech.

Well, damn. Regardless of what ends up arriving, I’m really hoping it actually fits inside the Fractal Design Node 304 😬

Honestly, they might as well just write off that entire segment at this point. It’s clearly not worth pouring R&D dollars into a market they don't even care about. There will always be some niche demand for legacy hardware or rebranded old stock from someone trying to patch together a budget rig—like an ancient desktop lacking integrated graphics—and that’s really where the story ends.

No one who actually knows what they're doing is going to build a new system around something like a Celeron paired with a GT 710 or 740. If you aren't gaming, why bother with a dedicated card when the CPU has integrated graphics? And if you *are* gaming, you'd either buy a decent used GPU for the same price or just opt for a modern quad-core APU with actual performance. Sure, there are outliers—maybe someone needs extra video outputs or something specific—but those are tiny margins. I’d bet my bottom dollar that most of their sales in this category are just outdated machines meant to fill space on a shelf.