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[daveman]

HI there,

I am still looking to get a NUC for my theatre.  New versions of the NUC have appeared recently and I am looking at the following models

http://ark.intel.com/compare/84861,83254,83255

I am unsure of the differences and which will be best for MC20.

Comments?

[aliweshky]

yes, the broadwell chips from intel are announced, right now only for the pentium series.
about the nuc, it is a while that they have put the broadwell nuc's on their website so it is coming very soon.
about the performence: now they have dedicated 2/3 cores for internal graphics. i think they are pushing to get the amd equivalent of processing and graphics performance.

so if you are certain about a nuc type media centre, just wait a while for the broadwell, it's worth it

[lisbethfox]

How high end is your Home Theater / Presentation device?
An NUC will do very poorly with MadVR on its highest possible settings (NNEDI3 chroma upscaling + image doubling or quadrupling) and on high end presentation devices its a big difference to use MadVR

[daveman]

I have a 120 inch screen in my soundproof theatre.

I am looking to build a very good HTPC but it needs to be small and silent.

advice on specs?

[mwillems]

I have a 120 inch screen in my soundproof theatre.

I am looking to build a very good HTPC but it needs to be small and silent.

advice on specs?

The 2014 generation of NUCs can handle mid to high-level MadVR settings just fine, they just won't do NNEDI, and struggle with interlaced content on some settings.  My i5 Haswell NUC can run Lanczos 3 tap on any content I've tried, and can even do Jinc + AR with non-interlaced content.  I would expect the next gen NUCs to be slightly better.

For comparison, I run an NVIDIA 660Ti in my living room HTPC, and it can handle Jinc +AR with all content, but still struggles with NNEDI on some content.  I have an NVIDIA 970 on my gaming rig and it can handle NNEDI on all content just fine.

So to answer your question, if you want the absolute best MadVR performance, you will not be able to have a "small and silent" HTPC.  The Asus Strix 970 is relatively quiet when not under load, and the fans aren't terrible when they spin up, but the card is enormous.  I had trouble fitting it into a full tower case, much less into an HTPC case.  A 660Ti will fit in the largest HTPC case that Silverstone makes (but not into the smaller ones), but I couldn't get the 970 into it (although cleverer people than I am may be able to "fit it" with machine tools).

If you want small and quiet you'll need to make at least a small compromise on performance.  If I were you I'd look for some screen capture comparisons of Lanczos vs. Jinc vs. NNEDI scaling and see if you think the difference is worth having a great big computer or not.  I do a lot of gaming, so I usually have one or two big cards around so the Home Theater use just sort of piggy backs off of that.  

If I were only watching movies, I would probably be happy with the integrated graphics on the NUC.  YMMV of course, I only have a 60" screen    You should be able to find comparisons over on the MadVR forums and satisfy yourself.

[lisbethfox]

The 970 is a small card compared to the R295x2 and the GTX Titan Z's. I highly recommend one, or a GTX 980 (If you're outputting at 4k)  for an HTPC build. Forget building an NUC imo if you want truly high end playback. Build an HTPC in a large case and throw it in another room. Quiet machines are cow dung.. just leave it elsewhere like a closet and your problems will be gone.
The difference between Jinc and NNEDI3 is stunning and totally worth the increased hardware requirements.