I have been working on this HTPC on and off for a few months now. I put in the dual ball bearing fans this week and noticed while I had the case open that one of the fans on the power supply was dead. So I fixed that this morning and thought I'd post some pictures and specs for everyone. The case was a nasty OLD tan desktop case I got from work. The motherboard is an ASUS K8NE-Deluxe with an AMD 64-bit 3200 Processor. 3GB's of PC3200 RAM. The OS runs on a 250GB SATA HDD, and for storage I have a 1TB SATA HDD. Video card is an AGP Sapphire HD3850 with 512 RAM on board. DL SATA Liteon DVD Burner for an optical drive. It has a total of 8 very low DB low RPM fans in it, which means it pushes plenty of air through it and it always stays nice and cool, but the fans all run very quiet.
I have our entire movie library (most of them DVD ISO images), music library, and picture library all on this machine. This means that I never have to play and actual CD or DVD anymore even though it can. So I boxed them all up and there are now in the attic (not getting scratched).
This is also the machine that host my Subsonic Music Service. For media playback you have lots and lots of options. I use XBMC (Xbox Media Center) for all movie, music, and pictures. I use the internet to pay media like Hulu or MLB.tv premium (Cardinals games). It's really nice to have and it beats the crap out of a standalone DVD player.
Let me know what you think. Also, if you want an account to my Subsonic Music Service just let me know, it's free, and I have quite a bit of music.
2 comments:
Very cool. I love the fact that everything's ripped to a hard drive and is saving you tons of space in a media cabinet. A couple of bonuses to that end is that all your media is VERY accessible and your original media isn't getting handled and potentially scratched/ruined. Very slick!!
On a side note, what's up with the 3.5 floppy drive??? :-)
The on board RAID controller requires drivers that have to be loaded via floppy. Even though I'm not currently using the controller for a RAID array, I still have to load those drivers in order to utilize those SATA ports. Keep in mind that this is my only Windows machine. I am thinking very seriously about making it an Ubuntu machine like the rest though. Windows is just so slow and cumbersome. When I had Ubuntu on this machine before, it responded nearly 3 times as fast. But my video card is ATI based and Windows does seem to drive it a little better, however, I'm not sure it's worth it.
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