Cheap 3d HTPC

[gsmith258]

We're clearing out an old room and I was thinking of turning it into a home theater. The projector I've chosen is 3dtv play ready, so I thought it would be cool to build a cheap HTPC that we can watch 3d movies on. I have ( http://pcpartpicker.com/p/rvZdP6 ) this so far, but I was looking for your opinions. I haven't yet chosen a case, but the HTPC might be going up in the attic if I can figure out the logistics, so the case needs to have good airflow and amazing dust filters. Thanks in advance. Overall budget is under $450 USD.

 

[jossrik]

Are you in an area that gets hot in the summer? Also, for movies, you can get by with a medium grade APU no need for a dedicated graphics card adding heat into the case. If your in an area that gets hot, you might want to keep it in the house instead of in the attic because that's basically running it in a hot box. On the other hand, just running movies/streaming shouldn't be too CPU intensive. You should run most of the time at near idle. Not sure on cases to get. Seems like only the more expensive cases have dust filters, and if there's dust all ready in massive quantities then it's going to be a nightmare to keep clean no matter what you do. I'd go for a tower cooler like the cryorig or the hyper 212. More mass gets you closer to cooling without a fan, you still want a fan, but if it gets full of dust, it'll still give you some protection against overheating.

I know you want to keep under a certain budget, but you have extenuating circumstances that suggest you should beef up certain areas of your build, like a PSU that will run passively under a certain load. I know they're more expensive, but passive means less dust. Big fans that run slow. Less dust, you want to move air, but not so much that you're pulling everything in.