In this new series of posts we will occasionally be taking a look at PCs. Today we take a look at a low price Home Theater PC build priced between 200$ and 230$.

  Model Price (USD / INR Aug '20) Price change (April '22)
Processor Athlon 3000G
with Radeon Vega 3 integrated GPU
(2 core /4 thread)		 49$ / Rs.4100/- =
Memory 8GB DDR4 3000Mhz
(4GB*2 Sticks)
16GB DDR4 3000Mhz
(8GB*2 Sticks)		 30$ / Rs.2100/-
50$ / Rs.5000/-		 decreased
Storage

16GB USB 3.1

120GB SATA SSD

6$/Rs.409/-

18$ / Rs.1800/-

Rs.180/-

decreased
Motherboard

minimum A320 motherboard
(no overclocking),
or,
minimum B450 motherboard
(overclock-able)
or,
mini A520 motherboard
(no overclocking)

55$ / Rs.4000/-,
or,
70$ / Rs.6300/-
or,
70$ / Rs.5800/-

decreased

decreased

Rs.4000/-
Power Supply minimum PSU 10$ / Rs.699/- =
Case Repurpose old case,
or, breadboard, or,
Any case based on your choice
 

 

Difference between A320 and B450:

A320
  • doesn't support overclocking.
  • Processors supported: upto Ryzen 2000 series CPUs(upto 8 core/ 16 thread CPUs) and upto Ryzen 3000 APUs(Upto 4 core/ 8 thread). 
  • For APUs, HDMI port on most A320 motherboards supports HDMI 1.4b with max. resolution 4096 x 2160 @ 24 Hz / 2560 x 1600 @ 60 Hz.
B450
  • supports overclocking.
  • Processors supported: upto Ryzen 3000 series CPUs (upto 16 core/ 32 thread CPUs) and upto Ryzen 3000 APUs (expected support for ryzen 4000 APU). 
  • For APUs, HDMI port on most B450 motherboards supports HDMI 2.0b with maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160 @ 60 Hz.

A520

  • doesn't support overclocking.
  • Processors supported: upto Ryzen 5000 series. 
  • For APUs, HDMI port on most A520 motherboards supports HDMI 2.1 with maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160 @ 60 Hz.
(Confirm motherboard specs before purchase)
 
Recommendations for motherboard for HTPC:
All prefer motherboard that supports HDCP 2.2 or above and HDMI 2.1 so that 4k output is supported. All Gigabyte motherboard seems to support HDMI 2.1 and HDCP 2.3 as per their website specs.
 
Why we chose AMD and Athlon 3000G:
AMD, because AM4 is an easy to upgrade platform if we so desire in the future. 35 Watt power consumption and the price helped us choose Athlon 3000G. 
 
Home Theater PC but also good for:
Internet Browsing, Light Gaming, streaming media(video,audio). 

Parts you can reuse from old PC:
  • Power supply (in most cases)
  • case / cabinet
  • storage (HDD / SSD)
Interesting PCs:
Mini PCs from various brands make for an intresting proposition, but the lower cost of self setting up a PC; made us opt for the parts mentioned above.

Some notes regarding various PC Parts:
HDMI 2.1 supports a theorotical bandwidth of 42.6 GBps thereby supporting 8k @ 30fps and upto 8k @ 120 Hz with Display Stream Compression (DSC) as per wikipedia listing on HDMI.
 
Last updated: 04/2022 

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