Finally an HTPC :)

**aud19** · 02 February 2009, 19:43 Monday

Nice! I'm a little jealous...that's pretty close to what I'm hoping to do at some point :T

**Hdale85** · 02 February 2009, 19:48 Monday

I really liked that case because it has a touch screen LCD but it's not a huge overpowering one it's nice and compact and will be nice for playing music without having my TV on for just basic info and what not.

**Alloroc** · 03 February 2009, 14:53 Tuesday

Nice case and nice spec. Dougie. Whatcha doing for audio?

**Hdale85** · 03 February 2009, 15:50 Tuesday

Well for music I have my Twisted Pear Audio dual mono Opus DAC. It uses the Wolfson WM8740. I like it very very much. For HT eventually I'll work out how to send music to the DAC and movies through HDMI to the Pre/pro (probably UMC-1 soon). We'll see how it works out I suppose but for the time being I only have a 2 channel system. I've just been running out of space like crazy and want a real HTPC rather then this huge case sitting in my rack haha. One step at a time as they say.

**Alloroc** · 03 February 2009, 19:20 Tuesday

Originally posted by Dougie085

Well for music I have my Twisted Pear Audio dual mono Opus DAC. It uses the Wolfson WM8740. I like it very very much. For HT eventually I'll work out how to send music to the DAC and movies through HDMI to the Pre/pro (probably UMC-1 soon). We'll see how it works out I suppose but for the time being I only have a 2 channel system. I've just been running out of space like crazy and want a real HTPC rather then this huge case sitting in my rack haha. One step at a time as they say.

Dougie, I posted this in another thread and I thought you'd be interested.... I know I am as it's the kind of thing I've been waiting for for a while now. I'm sure it's the first of many to start hitting the market over the next while but in essence, ASUS launched a HDMI 1.3a sound card that decodes all the new stuff and can carry video as well as audio. It's about €150 over here but it has me really intrigued.

Computex 2008 - ASUS Brings Joy to Our Ears

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3324

**Hdale85** · 03 February 2009, 23:24 Tuesday

Well it can carry video but you still have to feed it an input from your video card

There is one coming from Auzentech that actually is supposed to be better and support 1080/24p.

**Alloroc** · 04 February 2009, 07:05 Wednesday

Yeah, I'm aware of that card. It's due soon. I read it'll be about $250.

**Hdale85** · 04 February 2009, 11:21 Wednesday

Yeah I'll probably hold off a bit and wait for it to come down at least to around the price of the Asus which is around 200 bucks.

**Hdale85** · 05 February 2009, 11:40 Thursday

Well all my parts should be arriving tomorrow. The server won't be up yet as I'm still looking for a PCI-X raid card that's decent for not a ton of money...I may have one though. I'll try and slow down enough during the build to snap a few pictures

**maseline_98** · 05 February 2009, 13:00 Thursday

Originally posted by Dougie085

Well all my parts should be arriving tomorrow. The server won't be up yet as I'm still looking for a PCI-X raid card that's decent for not a ton of money...I may have one though. I'll try and slow down enough during the build to snap a few pictures

How much did all that gear end up costing you? That case looks amazing. You should post a review on it.

**Hdale85** · 05 February 2009, 18:33 Thursday

Umm, lets see I think something like 600-700 bucks? I can't tell exactly because there was 600 dollars worth of hard drives in there for my server :B

**PewterTA** · 06 February 2009, 10:49 Friday

Wooo Hooo Dougie, sounds like a sweet machine!

I'm going to build a new HTPC here soon. Definitely like what you've done, I'll probably grab that case, that's sweet, I was looking at the one with the 7" display, but it's a bit pricey.

Can't wait to see it up and running! :T

Where are you going to house all the drives since it only has 2 bays for HDs? Did you build/get a HD array?

**Hdale85** · 06 February 2009, 11:20 Friday

The hard drives are for a server

Not going in the HTPC haha.

I didn't like the 7" screen cases because the screen is large and distracting. This one was nicely balanced with a small bit visible touch screen. It's still pricey (I got mine for 369.99 from amazon) but I liked it so much I just had to have it lol.

**Hdale85** · 06 February 2009, 11:25 Friday

There is a possabilty the Motherboard isn't going to arrive. I also ordered a GTX-260 for my desktop as they had an open box one for 157 bucks and been meaning to get a better GFX card for the desktop. Anyways for some reason this package got flagged with an "Adverse weather conditions" even though there were a total of 3 packages that went through that same hub at the exact same time even one that was shipped from the same warehouse and this was the only one that got flagged. Anyways after that there were no update scans I called and they said it looks like they are trying to deliver it today still but possibly not. I hate when I pay for overnight shipping and things like this happen...lol oh well I guess. They said if it doesn't get delivered today it will be delivered Monday. Sucks cause I don't get to play with anything really because I'm missing the important parts for both systems

Also forgot to mention I ordered a Blu-ray slot loading slim drive for it as well. Got it on E-bay for 149.99. Newegg sells the same drive for 299.99.

**Kevin P** · 06 February 2009, 13:05 Friday

Nice setup so far Dougie... are you going to post another thread on your server build? I'm thinking of building a server myself so I'm curious as to what you have in mind. What brand 1TB hard drives did you get? I'm looking at the WD Green drives for mine. I'm trying to make my server fairly environmentally friendly.

**Hdale85** · 06 February 2009, 13:09 Friday

Ok so I got my packages and sure enough motherboard is not here...very disappointing. Oh well, I opened up the case and took a bunch of pics of the case and the Silverstone PSU, installed the PSU took some more pics. I'll kind of break each picture down here for you to see.

Up first a picture of everything I received today. One note, the video card may be going back. I've come to find out that it may not do deinterlacing so well because of the lack of pipelines. Apparently it only has 8 pixel pipelines and some of the more advanced deinterlacing requires a good bit of power. So I may be sending it back in favor of a 9400gt which does all the hardware acceleration I need and it's 1Gb and only 14 bucks more and has a native HDMI port.

As you can see from this picture the case is packed very well!

More very nice packaging, the case it self is wrapped in a nice cloth bag.

Case removed from bag, mmmm sexy

The front looks really shiny because there is a protective plastic cover over the front.

Accessories box, one note if you happen to use an EIDE CD/DVD rom drive (as it needs to be a slim drive) the case comes with an EIDE to IDE adapter. Pretty sweet that they included such a thing even though my BD drive uses SATA. Also the remote this comes with is pretty nice. Looks to be standard media center style. But I have my Harmony One

Inside shot of the case, looks to be very well laid out for nice airflow you'll see more of this in the coming pictures though.

Top shroud removed, you can see lots of cables for all the front panel stuff, I'll have to spend a good amount of time originizing all this.

This is the shroud that was on top. It houses your slim-line optical drive as well.

Here is the Silverstone PSU. It's very nice quality. I'm pretty impressed with this PSU, granted it's not the cheapest it certainly feels on par with quality vs price range. Note that this PSU is specially made for the smaller Silverstone cases as it has shorter cables.

The little bag of goodies that came with the PSU, it has some nice velcro style cable ties as well as regular screws and thumb screws.

PSU mounted inside the case, you can see from the previous pictures there are vents right under it to allow nice airflow through the PSU.

With the shroud/optical drive mount in place you can see it's designed so that nothing is blocking the fan. There is also a good inch between the fan and the top of the case probably.

Case sitting in my rack

Looks very nice if you ask me haha.

Ok so that's everything for now. I'm very happy with this case though it looks incredibly nice. I can't wait to get the motherboard though. I'll post more pics and impressions when I get the LCD working and stuff. My only gripe is that the case is not all Aluminum. But really at this price it would be very cheap aluminum if it was all aluminum. So really the sacrifice isn't to bad. I don't think cooling will suffer much from not being all aluminum. The heatsink I grabbed is very nice because the way it's positioned it's very close in proximity to those rear fans. I'm not sure if those rear fans will stay it depends on how noisy they are. As you can see I bought a very high flow 120mm fan that is only something like 9 dBa.

**Hdale85** · 06 February 2009, 13:14 Friday

Hey Kevin, I'm not sure on the server build......I've been considering building a server from scratch but I have this older Dell server that I bought a while back and have an PCI-X raid card for it as well as some gigabit adapters. But I still kind of want to build from scratch, if I do I will certainly post up a build thread.

The hard drives I got are Samsung Spinpoint 7200rpm. A lot of people over AVS seem to have had bad luck with a lot of the WD Green drives. The Samsungs have been pretty stable though. Stay away from the newer Seagates. The 7200.11 ones have had countless issues and so far that I know of haven't been worked out. This includes the 1.5TB drives which I really wanted to get as they are only 30 bucks more then the 1TB drives but I didn't want to risk my data.

**Kevin P** · 06 February 2009, 14:08 Friday

Very nice case, it does look good in your rack.

Is your rack home built?

How come the word "Conquer" is written on your palm?

I'll have to keep that in mind WRT the WD hard drives. I've used Samsungs in prior builds, including my HTPC and they have been solid. I don't trust Seagate either. My firewall box had a 40GB Barracuda that was <2 years old and it crapped out last summer. I threw in a spare Samsung 160GB (one that survived my house fire, meaning it's going on 4+ years now) and it's been working fine since.

**Hdale85** · 06 February 2009, 14:16 Friday

Well I've had good experiences with Seagate in the past but their latest drives have had a huge RMA rate. Especially when used in RAID systems.

Conquer was from when I was at the store and I saw a game I wanted to look up some reviews when I got home lol. It was Lord of The Rings Conquest actually. The word on there is Conquest but hard to see the end

I'm kind of leaning towards ordering an Norco 4020 case with a PSU and a motherboard/cpu if I can find a motherboard that has PCI-X slots as well as PCIE so that later I could upgrade to a nice PCIe RAID card. Either that or maybe I'll just sell the current stuff I have and start from scratch. The Dell server is just so noisy....and I don't know if I want to go through it ripping all the fans out and rigging stuff up. It doesn't even really have a place for me to mount the 6 hard drives.

**dyazdani** · 06 February 2009, 15:06 Friday

I was thinking it might say "confused" :lol:

Nice looking stuff!

**Kevin P** · 06 February 2009, 15:22 Friday

I'd stick with software RAID rather than a hardware RAID card, simply because, if that hardware RAID card fails, you're dead in the water unless you can replace it with another identical card. Software RAID doesn't care about the controller; if your motherboard or RAID card fries, you can move the drives to another machine and still be able to access the array.

The only advantage to hardware RAID is better performance in heavy usage, which you won't see in a home server, and even if you did, a dual or quad core CPU will handle the load nicely.

**impala454** · 06 February 2009, 16:21 Friday

Great looking case Dougie.

FWIW, I have had four of the WD 'green' 1 TB drives running in a RAID5 for about six months straight with zero probs. The only time it's been turned off was when I moved (I do not let the drives power down or go to sleep).

And not to disagree with Kevin, but I'd definitely go hardware RAID. I've seen too many array problems with software. Just my $0.02.

**Hdale85** · 06 February 2009, 16:43 Friday

Hardware raid is mucho expensive. Eventually I'll probably grab a nice hardware raid card. For now I'm going to do software raid. By the way I ordered a bunch of parts for the server

Decided against messing with the old Dell. So I'll get those parts mid next week probably and I will post a new thread for the server build. It's not to terribly impressive. Quad core phenom 2gb of ram and what not. I just made sure there were PCIe ports for adding a nice raid card later.

**Alloroc** · 06 February 2009, 22:51 Friday

Dougie.... looks great! A busy weekend for you!

**Hdale85** · 06 February 2009, 23:24 Friday

Not really.... see I can't put it together until Monday now when the motherboard comes lol.

**Hdale85** · 07 February 2009, 12:36 Saturday

Well apparently they upped my package to Saturday delivery since it was an overnight shipment? Either way I got the motherboard today

I'm putting it all together right now.

**impala454** · 07 February 2009, 14:26 Saturday

Originally posted by Dougie085

Hardware raid is mucho expensive.

Where'd you get that idea? I got this sucker in my server and it runs great, only $120. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816102140

If you get a 4-port they're not bad. 8 port and greater is where they get expensive.

**Hdale85** · 07 February 2009, 14:38 Saturday

Yeah there inlies the problem

My case that I'm using is a 20 hotswap bay SATA/SAS case. So the SATA raid card I want that has 24 ports is 1100 bucks. Eventually I'll get that card but for now I'm going to run software raid with my 6 hard drives.

Going to have to learn how to expand the array right away as I have to use one of the 1TB drives to backup all my stuff so I can get my HTPC running and then put the other 5 drives in the server when it gets here and then put all the data on the server and then add the 1TB drive back in.

**Kevin P** · 07 February 2009, 14:55 Saturday

Originally posted by Dougie085

Going to have to learn how to expand the array right away as I have to use one of the 1TB drives to backup all my stuff so I can get my HTPC running and then put the other 5 drives in the server when it gets here and then put all the data on the server and then add the 1TB drive back in.

Why not insert that drive as a hot spare? That way, if a drive fails, the array will immediately start rebuilding on the spare, and then all you have to do is replace the failed drive and make the replacement a spare.

Or stick it in an external enclosure and use it for backups...

**Hdale85** · 07 February 2009, 15:37 Saturday

I shouldn't really have any issues if a drive fails other then my array probably won't be available until I replace the drive. Or maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about

I'll be running Raid 5 or maybe even Raid 6... Raid 6 allows up to 2 simultaneous drive failures. Raid 5 of course allows 1. With 6 drives I think raid 5 would be fine but eventually I'll add more drives (up to 20 total) in which I think Raid 6 would be better. More drives more opportunity for one or multiples to die.

**impala454** · 07 February 2009, 17:11 Saturday

Originally posted by Dougie085

Yeah there inlies the problem

My case that I'm using is a 20 hotswap bay SATA/SAS case. So the SATA raid card I want that has 24 ports is 1100 bucks.

Good Lord... yeah don't forget the $3,000 worth of hard drives and $500 power supply that will go into that too

Me personally I'll just chill until the 3-4 TB HDs come out and replace my four. but more power to ya, I say go big or go home :B

**Hdale85** · 07 February 2009, 17:33 Saturday

well the reason I went with a huge case like that is because gradually over time 1TB drives will come down in price lol. So when I start needing more space they should be cheaper. And really a 20 drive array doesn't draw all that much power. Someone that has a 48 TB server (48 1TB drives) recently measured how much current he was drawing on the server and it was only around like 350 watts.

**impala454** · 07 February 2009, 21:36 Saturday

Not for the amount of power, for the plugging 40 hds in

**Hdale85** · 07 February 2009, 22:01 Saturday

Ah well you see there is a nice backplane that takes care of that

I'll be posting a thread here tonight showing the parts the server is using and you will see then.

**impala454** · 07 February 2009, 22:28 Saturday

sounds like you got it all figured out. can't wait to see it all together.

**Hdale85** · 07 February 2009, 23:46 Saturday

Well HTPC is up and running..... havne't installed anything specialized yet still working on getting it to network with the other PC's. For some reason it's not working. I used the same settings through windows little wizard as my other computers and it doesn't show up for some reason.

**Hdale85** · 08 February 2009, 00:57 Sunday

Well got the networking thing worked out

This motherboards onboard HDMI is supposed to output audio as well but I can't seem to figure out how to make it do this. I returned the 8400gs and ordered a 9500gt instead so I can't use that until it comes in. But figured I'd play around a bit with the onboard. The 9500gt will be nice because software decoding on this thing is using a lot of CPU. Something like 80-90%.

One thing I'm extremely pleased with is how quiet this unit is! It's excellent. I can just barely hear it when I'm standing right next to it. The CPU is idling at something like 40c which is quite low considering there isn't a fan on it really

Although the 120mm fan I put in is drawing some air through the heatsink I'm sure.

**Bent** · 08 February 2009, 11:27 Sunday

I want one.

'nuff said.

**audioqueso** · 08 February 2009, 18:54 Sunday

Dougie, get some Scythe fans. Or if you need some from here (since I hear they're hard to obtain in the states), let me know. You will not be compromising ANY noise at all. I have two 120mm fans and one 90mm fans running at 1800-1900rpms and even if you put your ear right next to the pc, it's almost impossible to hear. I've switched fans in the past, but never heard a night and day difference with any other fans, but they Scythe fans are impressive. I have my 2.6Ghz P4 (they ran hot, remember?) at 29-30c constantly. At full load, they run at about 34c.

**Kevin P** · 08 February 2009, 21:12 Sunday

Newegg carries Scythe fans. I put one in my Phantom Stalker II case when the original Antec 120mm fan died. It's quiet, but it doesn't push as much air as the original (it's a low CFM fan for low noise).

That Promise RAID controller has some crappy reviews. And like I said before, if a hardware RAID card dies, you would have to replace it with an identical (or compatible) card, otherwise you'll lose the entire array.

If you're going with 20 drives, I'd at least go RAID 6, or better yet, break the drives up into multiple arrays. With 20 drives, you could do 4 5-drive arrays or 5 4-drive arrays, or 3 6-drive arrays plus 2 hot spares, which would take over in any of the arrays if a drive fails.

**Hdale85** · 08 February 2009, 21:35 Sunday

Just a moment...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835191012

This is the fan I put in it. It's extremely quiet and moves A LOT of air. I also put it on the CPU fan header so it adjusts speed when needed. Even at the lower speed setting it moves quite a bit of air. I really can't hear it at all standing 1ft away.

**impala454** · 08 February 2009, 22:15 Sunday

Kevin you can diss the card if you want, but there's four reviews on the thing, and they're pretty weak. I've learned to take newegg reviews with a grain of salt. Especially if they're as old as those reviews are.

As far as software vs hardware raid, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

**PewterTA** · 08 February 2009, 22:19 Sunday

Dougie, what OSes you using on the HTPC and Server?

**Hdale85** · 09 February 2009, 01:55 Monday

The HTPC is running XP SP3 for the time being. I'm not sure if upgrading to vista is going to offer me much, I'm also not to sure about running Vista on 2gb of ram. As for the server I'm not completely sure yet. I've heard there are some issues with Windows Server and software raids? But my friend Bob says that's nonsense, says Server 2003 or 2008 does software raid very well. I've also been considering Linux and using either FreeNAS, FlexRaid, MDADM or something of the sorts. I've heard of good results with MDADM. My only issue with linux is I've used it a good bit but not so much the server side of things...I'm sure I could learn it but might take a big. Of course I don't know much about the server side of things with windows server either so??? Who knows it may be the same learning curve either way. There are some things that linux can do that windows server can't though.

Finally an HTPC :)

Finally an HTPC :)

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