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After thinking about it a bit more, I don't think you would need a friendly UHD drive for this little PC. After all, it is an Intel CPU with integrated graphics, so it should be SGX compliant. Any old UHD slimline should do the trick. You wouldn't want foxy running for this drive, so that way you are 100% UHD Blu-ray compliant. Obviously UHD ripping wouldn't be an option on it, but for a living room PC that seems fine. I've got plenty of friendly drives elsewhere in the house.

Seems to be a sweet HTPC. I will see if I can budget it in. I haven't had a bluray player in years so UHD optical capability may not mean that much to me anymore. I might opt-in for a bluray drive though. Never know when you have to install something, or quickly check out a movie disk.

This is the only one with the specifications I want. Dual drive which includes the dvd and i7. I wish it had 16 GB of ram. I have to find a cheap way to upgrade it maybe to 20 GB? I wish that I had the $300 that the lightning burned to cinders.


https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-VivoMini-Mi ... B073PZ6KV5

Curious why you chose that one. It's 50% more expensive ($600 vs $400) for the CPU upgrade. The $400 unit has a 512 GB SSD, while this one has a 1TB 2.5" HD (spinner), which is painfully slow. Both have 8GB RAM and the same DVD ODD.

Is that 7700 really worth that much more than the 7400? I haven't compared them, so I'm really asking.

Both versions have an m.2 PCIe slot available, so you could pop in a NVMe drive for really fast performance.

Not sure why you would need 16GB for a HTPC unless you are gaming... I've used 8GB for years on my HTPC's and it's been... fine.

I guees your right on this one. The $400 would meet my need for a HTPC. I just have to check the sgx specs but I don't know why. Powerdvd is strong arming their way out of the market.

Now I really want that $300 back

Here's a link comparing the i5-7400 vs. i7-7700: http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/426/In ... -7700.html

From a CPU perspective, the i7-7700 is definitely faster, with higher clock speeds (both base and turbo). Plus the 7700 has SMT hyper-threading and a tiny bit more cache. Other than that, these are both 4-core, 65W CPU's with identical feature sets. I doubt any of this would make a difference for a HTPC, unless you are doing heavy image processing in MPC/JRiver with LAV & madVR, which could make use of the extra uumph.

From and integrated GPU perspective, they are identical except that the 7700 has 15% higher max clock speeds. Since these are max speeds, they are not guaranteed, and must stay within the CPU's 65W TDP limits. It's possible that if you are hitting both the CPU & GPU hard, that the 7700 may have to throttle back more on the GPU since the CPU is more powerful and will eat up more of the power budget. On pure GPU loads, with the CPU mostly idle, the 7700 should have faster graphics.

But all of this probably only matters for gaming, and likely won't impact HTPC movie watching, unless like I said you are wanting to do powerful LAV/madVR image enhancement, for which I would expect the 7700 to be better. But $200 is a big jump for that.

Jamie wrote: ↑Fri Aug 23, 2019 8:25 pm I guees your right on this one. The $400 would meet my need for a HTPC. I just have to check the sgx specs but I don't know why. Powerdvd is strong arming their way out of the market.

Now I really want that $300 back

Power dvd can go pound sand. Really. I think it’s a terrible player. I think I’m more upset with myself at spending the money on it.